problem rendering products with black bg

[Billabong]

I have a series a phones I need to render out on a complete black bg. The problem is, most of these phones have a huge amount of chrome or reflective black plastic.

I have tried using a vray HDRi in the reflection/refraction enviroment override, but it washes out most of my mats. Is there a proper way to do this or something that im missing. Ive also tried not using any HDRI and just light planes, but the chrome doesnt show up

I would really appreciate any help.

Thank you

-B

[Alan Iglesias]

First, just try a regular bitmap in the Reflection Override slot (or the Environment Map slot) just to see if the HDR image has gamma or exposure issues. If that works OK, and it should barring any other issues I may not be aware of, then check your HDR image and settings to see if there is a way to adjust it so that it is exposed properly in your shot. Also, if you are setting a gamma correction in max, then your maps have to be adjusted accordingly.

Hope this helps,

-Alan

[Billabong]

Thank you Alan for replying. I tried your suggestion and just added a basic gradient ramp to the enviroment slot as you can see from the image, it didn't come out like I had hoped? any ideas or suggestions? let me know what information you need from me and Ill post it

Thanks again for your help

-B

[Alan Iglesias]

I would say that your shot looks pretty much the way I might expect it to. It looks like the Gradient, though not creating many interesting reflections, is at least not washed out. You could add some noise to the gradient to "busy" it up and see how that looks. I would try a regular bitmap, say, a shot of the interior of a room or something like that (if the reflections are too clear, you might blur the map a little first for a fake DOF effect). You might even try a Noise Map for something more generic, and you can easily adjust the Noise Maps's size and complexity until the reflections are looking more to what you are expecting. On that note, see this thread as it has some information regarding creating reflections without an actual physical environment:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...etal&highlight

-Alan

[Billabong]

Alan thank you so much for your help, I will deffinetly take a look at that thread and use your suggestions. Will let you know how it goes

Thanks again

-B