lighting material help

[pfistar]

are you using the scanline renderer or mentalray?

[vallaha]

mental ray

[pfistar]

ok so you obviously have the raytracing working for you, because I can see that the object is reflecting parts on itself. But it appears the environment is a flat grey. So the other question is: Are you using geometry as your reflected environment or are you using a map in your environment channel?

Either way, the reason your reflections look flat is because the environment the metal is reflecting is flat so you need to change that to something with more contrast, like an HDRI map of a studio environment, that has bright spots and dark spots. You can find something online, or create it yourself in Photoshop. Those dark & bright spots will show up on the reflective metal and you'll get the more "high contrast" effect you're probably looking for.

there are 3 ways to do this:
1) create a large sphere or cylinder at the center of your scene & assign your environment map to it with a spherical UV map. Make sure it's material is 100% Self-Illuminated & make sure it's quite a bit bigger than the swiss army knife. Apply a 'Normal' modifier to it so that the polys are facing inward. Right click it and in 'Properties' make sure that it's invisible to the camera but visible to reflections.
2) assign your environment map to the scene environment (press the "8" key). Instance that map to material editor & there you can adjust the way it gets projected onto the scene (Screen/Spherical/Cylindrical/Etc.)
3)Assign the environment map to the metal material's reflection channel. This is old-school way, and I'm pretty sure you can't do this using mentalray's ProMaterials

Another thing you might pay mind to is to make sure your model's geometry is accurate to real-life as this will yield more realistic looking reflections.

I think that's all can say for now - best o' luck
NpF

[vallaha]

cheers prob solved thanx for your help. by the way, do you know why my render window renders nothing but complete black? i must have clicked on something by mistake.

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