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View Full Version : how do you make fancy reflections?

cryptosporidium
08-15-2006, 09:42 PM
Well, share your experiences 3d lighting experts! I mean - do you use self illuminated planes for nice reflections over the scene? Where do you placing them? Or do you prefer reflection maps or are you HDRI addict? :-) I also would like to know if you have any tricks or techniques on how to fake HDRI lighting/reflections with lights or self illuminated objects, bcs. there are rarely HDRI images available that exactly suits my needs.

I ask because im having problems quite often to render my scene with really nice reflections and im spending disgusting ammounts of time to make shiny things look really shiny. Sometimes even if i place say 10 self-illuminated planes in the scene, i cant get nice reflections at the places i want. Talking generally about more complex scenes like interiors etc. to be clear. I would greatly appreciate if you would share your experiences.
CHRiTTeR
08-15-2006, 10:10 PM
It all depends on the scene and the look you are going for...

I think you should try and experiment with the techniques you mentioned and see for yourself ;)
cryptosporidium
08-15-2006, 10:24 PM
Yes of course it depends. But you know, i thought someone might post their common lighting setups for specific type of scenes (like packshots, cars, interiors...) or tips/tricks as mentioned above or maybe some articles or tutorials on lighting...
joconnell
08-15-2006, 10:33 PM
For a pack shot we'd normally use simple white cards or lights that are visible to reflections in the render - normally you dont want a tinted reflection map to alter the colours of the product since it's supposed to be an ideal / pristine pack. For most other circumstances though I'd use a spherical image of pretty much anything to give an object a bit of interest.

Reflections themselves are inheritly irritating to get into the right place so sometimes it's easier to have a large object in the scene such as a plane or sphere with an image mapped on to it which shows up in the reflections - you normally have this turned off to camera visibility, lighting and shadows. The nice thing is you can move the object in front of any object you want it to reflect in.
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