Old brick lighthouse modeled in Blender, textured in Substance Painter, and rendered in Blender using Blender Guru's PBR node setup.
The default image that you see was rendered with Pro-Lighting: Sky's so that HDR is not in the file but everything else is the same.
Thank you for the help! I used the pro-lighting: skys addon and changed the rotation so hopefully it will have better lighting now.
Much better now.
But either there is a texture seam showing to the left of the windows or it's a sharp shadow from the lighting addon. If it's a seam, I'd move it to the back of the lighthouse. If it's a sharp shadow, then try softening it so it blends with the objects.
A couple of minor suggestions. The angle of the shadows suggest early morning or late afternoon. Therefore I would dial down the strenght and add just a touch of yellow.
Move the ground, etc. up so that it aligns with the horizon of the Pro-Lighting Sky HDR to eliminate the black half of the lighting texture.
Finally, I'd add some texture to the ground. Although a nice coastal beach scene would really highlight your lighthouse, a super fast and easy way just to add a bit of interest is to download the Blendermada addon. It gives you online access to a number of materials. But the real magic is that you get a preview of the material you want to add to an object and just drag and drop it on the object and your pretty much done. Select a sand texture and drag it onto your ground plane. Or bring you ground plane into Substance Painter and give it a sand texture with some of SP's magic enhancements.
My apologies if I sould critical. That's not my intent. You have a very nice model and it's worth the time and effort to enhance it will getting good practice with lighting and texturing.
My comments come more from my current struggle with a complex project that has difficult modeling, texturing, lighting and the surrounding scenery. I find that I am noticing more when I view other people's art that I wish I had known previously.
Take care and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.
I haven't downloaded it, but the modeling looks good and I love Substance Painter--a steep learning curve but worth the effort.
However, I think the render would look better had you some light on the front of the structure--perhaps 45-60 degrees off the front and to the left. They way it is now, the viewer has to strain to see any details. the oblique lighting and some rim lighting would help significantly--at least in my opinion.