With Thea you should also play with filmic tone mapping. It will give you easier realistic results and you can fine tune the dark and bright parts of images to get a more natural look.
The question with Thea is that it isn’t made to look good by faking, you have to know the concepts involved. It’s based on realistic and scientific light knowledge, photography concepts and optimization of very specific and powerful hardware for all the computational requirements that accuracy demands.
It’s difficult to dominate these concepts and very difficult to make things look good if you don’t dominte them.
It’s very rewarding when you can, but if you’re looking for good looking output out of the box you’re going to be disappointed. This thread seems to be about managing your disappointment when what you would need to do is really learn the base concepts.
Some advices:
Get a good GPU or multiple good GPUs with good VRAM.
If you’re in a Mac or any laptop think about external GPU with thunderbolt connection If needed.
Learn about exposure in photography.
Learn about framing.
Learn about depth of field.
Learn about lighting.
Use only real life light values.
Learn about PBR materials and their authoring tools.
Learn about texture creation and UV mapping.
Learn about geometric details for realism
Use Thea bevels.
Use interactive render a lot, before commiting to final rendering.
Learn about thea proxy system.
Experiment a lot.
Start with small renders and progressively increase resolution as you feel more confident.
Learn about post processing and tone mapping.
Use denoiser options (intel and optix) in thea to make grainy renders not grainy at all, but don’t abuse it as details might get blurred out.
