image is washed out i with typical lighting..

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

hello and thanks for your time,

I have an object with a relief design on it. Think of the design as a tribal-like tattoo that has been slightly extrudes out of the object. The object has a high reflective silver material on it.
When my lights are placed perpendicular to the object (to the perfectly to the right and left), I get a nice render with sharp highlights and sharp shadows that show nice form and detail of the design.
But the silver material is rather dark, if not black because the silver material is reflecting nothing in front of it - just black world space.

So when I place my lights in front of the object to have a white reflection of light in front of the object, the relief image now becomes washed out with much less shadow and form definition. Is there a way to have the metal reflect white but still show great detail and form with out being wash out by the light intensity?

2

This is where HDR Light studio is the most useful app in the world.

3

thanks for the reply,
I didn’t want to use HDRI maps for a few reasons, I just wanted a clean image with neutral tones - almost greyscale.
But anyways, how would HDR light studio help?

4

there was a set of free ‘studio light’ hdri on cgtalk a few years ago
basically a monochrome softbox set up rendered out from some software - worked pretty well