HDRI for car reflections

[jdempsey12]

I pulled up my bimmer project to play with the HDRI images. I just put the HDRI image that comes with the car modeling kit just to see what it would look like. Yeah I think that it looks pretty cool but what if you don't want a building and trees in the reflections? I'm part of an media group here in Detroit and get this magazine every month showing off company work and stuff. Being from Michigan Car's are pretty big and this one ad had really nice reflections. It wasn't of any picture it was just a nice highlight. To get this affect do you have to just creat a HDRI image with just a line though it?

P.S. I still have a long way to go on this car, but I wanted to see the HDRI image on it.

[laxman]

Maybe not a line, but thats close. Usually that happens in real life when the sky is being reflected. Since the sky is all the same colour, and because its getting lots of light from the sun it makes that nice highlight. You should try looking for an HDR image that has lots of sky, or lots of space on the image which is almost the same colour (like a blue sky). Then make sure you have lots of diffuse on the reflective material, you should get what you want.

You could also try adding lights to emphasize the highlight, but i've never tried that.

[papa]

You can use an image that has more highlights in it that will then be reflective and the highlights will pop on the car.

You can make your own hdr images using hdr shop and photoshop and use white squares to simulate a studio lighting setup.

[jdempsey12]

Thanx Laxman and Papa,

Papa, when you say use squares, do you mean alot of little random squares, three of four medium squares, fat rectangles going all the way across the canvas?

I like the idea of simulating a lighting studio, maybe you could send me a quick example if you have time.

[Shogunato]

Hi

If you want a nice lighting studio you can use ImageStudio from autodesk.
Howerver with maya try to make a simple sphere around your scene with some plans inside using max incandescance with a white color.
Don't forget to choose Final gather with mental ray.

This is a hard way but i saw a lot of artist to use this technique.

hope this help and keep us updated :)