The right additional elements can really make (or break) a rendered image, adding life, vitality and a sense of real-world integration, or they can further emphasize a sterile sense of dislocation from the real world.

These renders on this project page are various items I've either modeled myself or repurposed (only where it works with the rights I have for the given model, of course) and textured, lit etc.

Working to perfect a perforated metal sunshade / brise de soleil which is materials based rather than geometry based for the perforations - I feel like I have it pretty well dialed in now - this looks pretty nice: depicts a perf metal screen and powdercoated steel throughout, including the braces and turnbuckles.

 

The point of it being materials-based is both to decrease rendertime and to increase flexibility: if the architect or designer changes their mind about the scale and pattern of the perf metal's perforations, if it were *modeled* I'd have to re-do all the geometry - but as it's materials-based, I'd just need to alter the material's perf map and re-render.

Now this one is a model I bought that someone else had built - small inaccuracies, but I fixed those, as I own this phone and so could easily see an example to base corrections on. The major point of this exercise was to go from their decent but not great model, correct it, and do a complete texturing job on it, as the textures it came with were not to my satisfaction.

I spent in total two hours to make model edits and retexture completely, set up a decent three point light rig and render.

This is another example of material development - in this case I used almost completely procedural materials whilst achieving worn areas, corrosion and actual rust effects, none of which are based on texture painting.

The one image driven portion is an underlying stone map used to drive some of the secondary dirt layer on the yellow paint - everything else is procedural.