I’m sure this has been discussed earlier, but I couldn’t fine one, so I started my own. What would be the best practice for rendering flat surfaces. I have sometimes used large scale bump mapping, but I’m sure the is better way. Attached picture has bee made with V-Ray Steel_Blurrt material. As we can see the flat surfaces do not look like metal at all.
What’s Your method?
Simply all in the reflection, so strategically placed lights/reflection cards to reflect, as e.g. phone renders have, or flat screen tvs 
Add nice chamfers on the edges plus some delicate bump everyehere - nothing is as perfect as cubes from 3ds max.
It’s not that easy. I work with scenes consisting of tens oh thousands of CAD-objects. I’m looking for an universal way for rendering flat metal surfaces in those scenes.
In that case fake chamfers with VRayEdgesTex.
Yes, but CAD geometry is already chamfered geometrically correctly. I’m looking a way to bring metalness to planar portions of surfaces.
It seems like exemple you posted is not quite representative of CADs you are working with. Can you share a bit more?
I made this sample scene by using standard max primitives to underline the issue. I have planar, cylindrical, spherical and double curved surfaces. Every other form than planar has metallic look. My intention was to open a discussion, what would be the best practice to have some metalness at the planar surfaces too.
VRayEdgesTex to get rid of sharp edges.
Some surface bump, smooth and gentle, perfect just doesn’t look realistic.
Anisotropic reflections if suitable.
Image based lighting for iteration speed, maybe some randomized setup mixing 2 or 3 environment maps so you can quickly click through options if manual setup is too tedious.
Always texture area lights, avoid perfect shapes.
I’m beginning to get some greenish light from client side on my renderings. However I have ran into slight performance issues with my new material settings. I wonder why it takes full 24 hours to render my scene with image size of 3508 x 2480 (printable A4-size).
I guess it’d be impossible to assess without knowing what sort of scene it is, so a sceenshot maybe?
I think I cant post any screenshots, but in the scene there’s one HDR environment dome light and few additional lights for reflection. The material is mostly built in Steel Blurry metal material, where I have added very slight VraynoiseTex bump map for reflection variance of planar surfaces.
Maybe highlights taking an age to resolve with the settings you have…reflections of those in other surfaces adding to that…really hard to guess.
You could maybe try reducing the power of the lighting in the hdri to see if that solves it (if that’s the culprit of course).
I have created dozens of variation and finally getting some greenish light from customer side. I would not like the idea of starting everything all over again. I was kind of hoping to get ideas on how to reduce the rendering times from 24 hours per image to few hours.
