making chrome in maya

[soulburn3d]

While this tutorial discusses Brazil, the theory is the same, make a surface that has a black color, and a 1 for reflectivity, with some glowing white cards in your scene to create interesting reflections...

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/glass_chrome_pottery/glass_chrome_pottery.htm

If you decide to go entirely the reflection map route instead of the raytracing route, just make a map in photoshop with lots of alternating black, white and grey vertical stripes, add that to an evironment sphere (or cube, or whatever, see the stuff under create-> environment textures) and then hook up the env shader to the reflection color of your chrome shader.

http://graphics.samsclub.com/images/products/0089254500009_LG.jpg

or if you want use a real photograph as your envionment map. Hope something in there helps.

- Neil

[thinsoldier]

thanks a lot, worked like a charm. But in maya I had to leave the specular color turned up unlike the tutorial.

Still haven't had any luck with using image maps tho, have no clue how game engines make them look so good.

[soulburn3d]

thanks a lot, worked like a charm. But in maya I had to leave the specular color turned up unlike the tutorial.

No problem. Ya, it seems in maya the reflectivity is connected to the specular, so you can't have a reflection without a specular, which actually makes physical sense (since the specular is just a reflection of a point light), although it does make the system less flexible. Also in brazil turning up the reflection automatically turns down the diffuse (in standard reflection mode), if you switch to additive mode it works like maya where you have to manually turn down the diffuse color as you turn up the reflectivity of the object.

Still haven't had any luck with using image maps tho, have no clue how game engines make them look so good.

Well, it all depends on what you use for your reflection. I use the white/grey/black lines all the time, and image maps works great too, especially if they're hdr images

http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

Although I'm not sure if vanilla maya cna load hri images or not.

- Neil

[tomhosking]

You could also use mental ray for this: use a DGS shader with specular set to 1.0, which will act as a perfect mirror. Then set up your scene with HDR lighting or environment and it should look great.

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