Reflection and emission

[robmoors]

Hi All,

Ive been running into a few problems trying to recreate a photo-realistic render of a HTC Hero.
The modeling and basic diffuse materials are by me and are no issue (apart from the brushed metal), however on the screen itself I want a reflection and a emission. and I have no idea how to achieve this.

This is what I have so far, just diffuse textures no lights:


And as for the touch screen itself this is what I want to get:


Now the main problem I run into is that when I let the screen reflect a rectangular light it turns pure white, if I mess with the IOR and glossiness it turns vague and the screen becomes unreadable. I want to achieve the same light reflection as the bottom image. And apart from that I also want to have an emission, I know it will be barely noticeable however if I make the environment darker for instance a dark studio setup with a few light I do want it to light up.

Ow yes and now I am here I might as well ask does anyone know where to get a decent brushed metal material as in the bottom image around the touch screen, I've tried a few I made none seem to work properly, let alone that I can get the settings right.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Reflection and emission

Seeing as it's already modelled to a high level of detail I'd circumvent the whole reflective/emissive material problem by modelling a separate emissive "screen" beneath a reflective glass layer. It should be easier to find the balance between the emissive and reflective properties of the screen.

For the satin aluminium material I'd use low Refletion Glossiness (maybe 0.4) some anisotropy (maybe 0.5) and very high subdivs: 100 or more. I almost never use Highlight Glossiness, it's a fake effect and causes weird results sometimes.

Hope this helps.

[robmoors]

Re: Reflection and emission

Worked like a charm, reflection is still a tad too bright if you ask me.


However the brushed metal isn't agreeing with me as you can see.
Still kinda of a new to the entire advanced material editing.

Here is the material I am using:
http://www24.zippyshare.com/v/99014708/file.html

I really appreciate the help Jackson!

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Reflection and emission

Looks good- what are you using as a reflective environment? This is often the trickiest thing with product renders as it can be very difficult to find/make a reflection environment which will do the product justice, especially as every product requires different reflections.

[robmoors]

Re: Reflection and emission

Well at the moment I am just using a white sky and white background, however I dumped the whole thing in a studio:



As for the touch screen itself its perfect now, a filter to tone down the reflection worked.
Still not happy with the brushed metal seeing I either overkill it, or it doesn't show up at all. Which at the moment looks better.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Reflection and emission

The problem is that despite using a "studio" setup with curved backdrop, rect lights, etc, your entire environment is still white, so all reflections are uniform, hence your metal just looks like white plastic. Product renders with lots of reflective materials usually need specific environment maps to create the desired effect. I don't normally work with product renders, but I nabbed this iPod model from 3DWarehouse and set up a quick studio environment.

There is no other geometry or lights in this model, just the iPod model. The background is just black "Acolor" (a gradient would also have looked nice), the glass screen material has a striped reflection map HDRI loaded in it's "Reflection" environment slot (the one in the "Maps" rollout of the Glass material) using a multiplier of 30 and the overall Reflection environment (the "Reflection" slot of the Environment roll-out) is a very blurred double-spot map HDRI using a multiplier of 20, both shown as jpgs below. As the environment map is so blurred I was able to get away with just 20 subdivs on the satin steel material so it rendered really fast: 1m 12s at 1400 x 800px on my Centrino Duo laptop. More detailed environment maps (or actual modelled surroundings) usually require much higher subdivs or the satin steel material would look extremely rough. The only post-processing is gamma adjustment in Photoshop and conversion from 32bit to 8bit.

The glass needed a separate reflection environment map from the rest of the model to get the right effect (I wanted striped reflections across the glass, but blurred reflections on the steel). I made both the reflection environment map HDRIs in Photoshop, it took a little experimenting, but they turned out OK I think. I put them and the steel material in a zip file at the following link:

http://rapidshare.com/files/31528007...REFL_THUMB.zip

[robmoors]

Re: Reflection and emission

Thanks Jackson,

I believe it's finished now. Couldn't have done it without your help!