Creating reflectors on cars, bikes -- and also reflective tape

[davision]

I have a night time scene and I really want to create the effect of a headlight bouncing off a reflector -- actually reflective tape (like you often see on the back of trucks).

Has anyone had any success in doing this? It seems to be a hard effect to recreate -- I want that bright "lively" appearance that reflectors exhibit in real life.

[simmsimaging]

I have had good results with making fairly realistic geometry for reflector lenses, and using this normal map (tiled appropriately). Use a material with high relection (white) and very high fresnel or just turn fresnel off.

For the reflective tape effect you could probably do something cool with the VrayCarpaint shader - it does a nice job of metallic effects.

/b

[dmf-123]

That's clever. Is there anything you haven't figured out, Brett?

[simmsimaging]

Very many things, but top of the list is how to retire young (ish)


That map is not my invention btw: I scavenged it out of a material somewhere along the way.

/b

[davision]

Thank you Brett, for the technique and the map. Seems to be helping.

[dmf-123]

And once you figure out that retirement thing, hope you'll share that too...

[simmsimaging]

that secret I will never share, but I'll also never get it - so no harm done either way

something that I forgot: you may find that tiling that little map too many times creates oddness with Vray and VrayRT. If you need to tile it extensively you may want to try creating a tiled version in Photoshop, say 20X20 or whatever, and use that in Vray. It seems to help with some of the anti-aliasing problems that can crop up with too much tiling.

/b