Ok so there are a couple of things: - Ray tracing in realtime uses heavy denoising on some passes, because otherwise it would require hundreds of samples which would cause 1 fps or less instantly. Global illumination is the most critical one here. Cast shadows only needs a lot of samples when the penumbra is large, and…
Look up workflows for special effects in movies, they have to match live footage and cg all the time. Nuke compositing software for example, it's used to match plates.
The renders above look like poser art, which is to say purchased assets put together to form an image. There is nothing wrong with that, but you have to be pretty good to pull it off. The difference in the quality of the figure and background makes the images jarring to look at. It looks like the model doesn't belong in…
I was looking at Paul Pepera's portfolio and I'm really fascinated with how he's added noise into his high poly renders. example: Does anyone know how this is done?