Refletive chrome in Black Environments

#1

How do the pros make their reflective silver chrome logos in BLACK environments with all those glints and glow around the rims?

#2

You can use a bunch of lights with ‘Emit Diffuse’ turned off so that they only create specular highlights, or create some white cards/shapes to appears in the reflections that can have glow added in post later.

#3

I made a cylinder in Maya, made a spotlight, turned off emit diffuse and place a Mia chrome preset on the object and the scene renders black. What am I doing wrong?

#4

Ok cool, so the two major factors will be the angle of the lights, and your object having nice bevelled edges in order to actually catch the highlights.

I’ve created a cylinder and applied the same chrome preset as you. The first image hardly shows anything because the top edge is infinitely sharp, there’s no surface area to catch a highlight. After you bevel those edges it works much better, then I added a bunch more lights. It does take a bit of experimentation to get the lights to catch the surface the way you’d like!

In that last section of the image I set my viewport renderer to ‘Viewport 2.0’, though it also works quite well in ‘High Quality Renderer’ mode, but you have to switch the material to a Maya one, such as a blinn. Then by pressing 7 in the viewport it goes into full lighting mode so you can see where you are placing your hightlights.

Typically I’ll actually use IPR though! That’s a very nice way to visually see where you are placing lights.

#5

Wow. That’s very nice of you. That helps a lot. I can’t get the nice fading of the light going down the cylinder like you did,but I’ll keep trying. I don’t have Viewport 2.0. I’m using Maya 2010. I don’t see it there.

Did you have to turn up your intensity pretty high or increase your penumbra?

#6

No worries! :thumbsup:

No I actually had to reduce my intensity to stop the whole side of the cylinder blowing out! All my other settings are the default. I wonder whether the chrome preset has changed since Maya 2010. On mine the ‘glossiness’ is set to 0.5, check if that’s what yours is set to because that will control the size of the highlights. My spotlights are not too far away from my cylinder either.

If you select a spotlight and press ‘t’ on the keyboard it will give you the special spotlight controls in the viewport so that you can position the aim point of the spotlight separately to the spotlight source itself, that way you can put the aim point right on the part where you want the highlight.

#7

glossiness is set to .5 as well in 2010. My light was pretty close and I used both the aim to start and then looked through the light to aim the middle of the circular view at the rim. But not as nice as your results. I’ll keep trying and then post some pics tomorrow. Thanks for all your help, Jozvex! :slight_smile: :applause:

You wouldn’t happen to be able to answer this question, would you?
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=7062302#post7062302

#8

You wouldn’t happen to be able to answer this question, would you?
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthr…302#post7062302

I gave you two answers to that post, come on :slight_smile:

#9

Hahaha!

Nick’s last answer was good he’s just busier than me. If you select the object, open the Attribute Editor and look under the Render Stats section, untick Double Sided and it will only render the faces you want!

As for Nick’s first answer, he was thinking like a pro shader TD, not like a regular Joe. What a nerd! :wavey:

#10

What a nerd!

Damn straight :slight_smile:

#11

(chuckles in embarrassment) I’m a nerd too, but that’s just social retardation. See! That wasn’t very pc. :banghead:

#12

Thank you very much :slight_smile:

#13

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.