Suggestions on how to make the band look more realistic

[Andrew365]

The following is a rendering of a ring I completed. I feel pretty good about the diamonds, but feel as though I am missing something in the band to make it more realistic. Does anyone have some suggestions to improve the overall quality of the render?

[andy.engelkemier]

It's mostly the model. Jewelry gets dipped and polished, so you'll never find a Perfectly flat face like that.
So you can edit the data so there aren't actually flat areas, like if you brought it into blender and sculpted it a hair (which is very time consuming and easy to go too far)
OR, you can use a large noise as a Very subtle bump map to add a slight amount of reflection wave. You might be able to do a bump add and try out an occlusion map there as well, to try and soften the fillets, which are also quite sharp.

I'm not sure keyshot will let you do that though. I can't remember which things are allowed, and you can Only put in one map into a bump slot, with no modifiers. I still don't understand that, but it is what it is. You can stack bump add over and over, but you can't modify the texture. So no masks, utilities, etc.

For realism you might also try micro scratches. Poliigon has a few that are fairly decent. You've got to get the scale just right, and make it SUPER subtle. A roughness and/or specular map might also give you some added realism. Those would need to be custom painted for realism though. You can only polish it where you can access it right? So you'll find the metal less polished in crevices right? You Might be able to make that work with an occlusion map and a color to number node, but those are always just a little noisy.

[Fouad bendaya]

you need to prepare your model for rendering
add a small bump to the flat surface and make the edges round

[andy.engelkemier]

Nice. That's exactly what I was thinking. It definitely looks more like a real object.