Whites blown out

[alexworx]

Hi all,

I am trying to find the best way to tackle this small problem I am having. My scene currently is being lighted by a hdri dome light. The helmet is unwrapped with a single texture on the outside. As you can see the whites and logos in general are blown out. Does anyone have any tips on how to avoid this? Is it a lighting thing or a texture thing.

Thanks for the time.

Alex

[Morbid Angel]

You have to spend some time balancing things. For example rarely materials in real world are pure white or pure black. Usually working with HDR alone is not enough, I'd suggest using hdr but also a few area lights as it will give you a nicer specular. I would also treat the helmet texture as separate materials as they are in real world. The logo would be a sticker, the helmet would be either plastic or whatever and so on. Each of the materials has different Frenel / reflectance and gloss properties.

[joconnell]

Also white isn't really white - what value is the white of the logo in your texture map? I think white paper is only about 92% white in the real world and not full on 255,255,255, likewise black isn't as deep as 0,0,0. I'd also render everything as exr so you've got plenty of room for colour correction afterwards and since clients are so picky about the colour of their logo I'd make yourself a black and white alpha mask for the logo and render this in an extratex channel so you've got a mask to tweak this specifically in post!

[AJ Jefferies]

What John and Dmitry said. Also, it looks like your reflections are clipping? If so, take a look at the cutoff values in your material.