Problems with HDRI renderings and silver paint material

[sweichert]

Dear all,

I am still in the testphase to figure out how to get the right light settings and materials. At the moment I am working on a connector and want to use just a HDRI Image for the lighting of the scene. But with any HDRI that I used so far
I got disappointing results. There is no contrast in the rendering and it looks very flat.
Any idea how to improve this? Do I always have to add at least one directional light?

Materials:
cable + button --> white rubber
housing --> light creme high gloss
connector part --> silver paint

Any remarks on the silver paint material? Does anyone have ideas how to improbe it or already created a nice shader?

Thanks for your help
Sven

Rendering with 2 rectangular lights

Rendering with HDRI Image (uffizi0)

[Micha_cg]

Problems with HDRI renderings and silver paint material

Some times it help to increase the contrast of the HDRI per gamma option. Also, you could try other HDRIs. The classical "building" HDRI is color neutral and could give a good reflection environment.

Also you should be careful with white materials. Be sure to use a color brightness not higher than (200,200,200) - 80% reflectance is the real world maximum.

I would try to use the building environment (low intensity) and additional arealights. The ground would be a medium grey material against to much diffuse reflected light. You could test a not flat ground plane - I mean this typical studio background. So you could get a color gradient from the lighting at the ground.

Also if you add a vignetting effect (free tool ptlens), you would concentrate the view at the middle.

Also try to use no secondary GI engine. So you could get darker shadowed areas. If you use QMC as secondary engine, you can choose the bounce count.

[flipside]

Problems with HDRI renderings and silver paint material

How much contrast there will be is completely up to you. It all depends on how you light your scene and choose your colors. Find a good balance between skylight and rectangular lights, play with their size, etc... Maybe choose a darker groundplane for such a light object.

Put some white objects in a white room with white light coming from all directions, and you will not even see the objects. That's a bit what's happening here.

The silver part is difficult here, because the object is so simple and the environment so clean. All in all I think it is quite nice already