I’m trying to create a black paint-like material with shininess. Think of a black billiards/pool 8 ball. Default lights are turned off in this situation and only HDRI is illuminating the scene. My material is coming out matte. Searched the forums and there’s just too many threads to read through. Has anyone found a way to get them to show up???
I swear there used to be a script that would create an array of omnis based upon an HDRI images. Might be great for that sort of thing. Kind of fakery but what are ya gonna do?
Thanks Percy. There’s gotta be something simple I am overlooking. CAuse this is way too complicated. White diffuse material with extreme fall-off perhaps??? Any better suggestions?
if your looking for speculars using vraymaterial from an hdri environment, then enable glossys. Thats about it. You cant get fake speculars if you dont have lights in the scene.
Perhaps I’m doing something wrong but no dice with the glossiness. I’m going to try to get some car paint materials to work with it for now then figure out what I am doing wrong.
I think you’ll need the hdri in the reflection overide or the environment.
Thanks but I tried that too.
how about posting some screenshots? or even better a simple scene?
Eh. I Was trying to avoid that lol. Here’s a WIP (not to be critiqued!!!):
I ended up using some black car shader material from Evermotion but it still isn’t dark and shiny enough. The parts that need to be shined are the nose and the (cough) boob shields.
hahahah that pretty damn cool, jujubee!!!
Can you show me your black material settings, see if we can work it out.
Love the Boob shields … Private work or client … or Fantasy ?
its hard to produce highlights from a hdri alone … drop a omni in there and you should have it … a little glossy and highlights and it should be fine..
Creating a good HDRI reflection can be tricky… look at this link:
oops sorry… while that is a good link, it was the wrong link… this one is more to the point.
Hey Daforce, the material was unnecessarily complicated for this scene but you can find it here (it’s the black one) if you are a registered.
http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/rendering/vray_car_paint/
Thanks Natty for your help. I thought adding an omni might blow out my scene like the default lighting- but I guessed wrong. Your’s is the simplest solution and probably the one I’ll take for this scene.
Cpnichols - thanks for that link - it looks really useful. I think I need a cup of coffee first tho before reading it as learning new things makes my eyes cross.
Thanks jujubee, yeah im an admin at Evermotion so no problems there 
Yeah like natty said, it is hard with just a HDRI, but it depends on the hdri. I would just put in an omni and get it to affect specular only, that might be worth a shot.
Love the Boob shields … Private work or client … or Fantasy ?
Hey Natty. Private work for a friend of mine. I modelled this off of one of her toys (from her sister’s toy store) which can be found at Schylling. If you just peck around for ‘Tin Toys’ in google you’ll come across a wealth of retro-styled robots. There’s alot of good stuff out there.
this one is more to the point.
Thanks again cp, but the only thing I think is being done differently from what I’m currently doing (besides using splutterfish’s generous HDRI loader) is the RGB level getting bumped to the clamped white point. My objects turn out more like Figure 1 which is dull rather than Figure 2 which is more of what I want. In figure 2, my understanding is that they are using a .jpg for the environment instead.
What I was looking to do was actually tweaking the material of an object itself to obtain a ‘shellac’ sort of effect using only HDRI. Basic Max Blinn materials don’t work and I can’t get the Vraymtl to shellac properly using this method. I wish there was some sort of separate ‘HDRI Shellac material’ for reflection while maintaining underlying colors/bitmaps. More like the eye-popping effects of Figure 2 in your link. Natty’s last suggestion circumvents this problem in an indirect way - I really dislike adding lights if at all possible but it serves wonderfully for what I am looking to do.
Keep ion mind that the example images on the toy site are photographed in a studio environment with soft boxes similar to area lights.
--Jon
Mmm. Yeah. Sure. Something like that.
It still remains, I still can’t get my nose and boob protectors to look like those pool balls without the omni blowing out the rest of my scene.
can you show a screenshot of your material setup?