Looking for recommendations for achieving good reflections with a chrome material in Rhino 7 render – is that even possible with native HDR, and is it something that can be repeatable without going deep into environment adjustments. For example, the grounded cylinder has good reflection on the top, but not along the front, whereas the floating cylinder is showing a better reflection along the angled front.
Any suggestions much appreciated!
jvm
You’re seeing the ground plane reflection, even though it is set to shadows-only. Best is to disable ground plane altogether and use an actual geometry you control yourself.
As for environment HDR textures you can choose from a collection that comes with Rhino pre-installed.
See also Rhino Rendering - #13 by BrianJ for a good tutorial video on rendering metals.
Thanks Nathan…the link is a little helpful. I’m really looking to get predictable hilights on metal in Rhino for packaging, and most shots are straight on and I don’t have the option of using multi colored environments for reflections. Don’t get me wrong, Rhino 7 is a great step forward rendering wise and it does a lot of things well, but I do really struggle with metal reflections – creating and adjusting. The attached image was not done in Rhino, but is an example of what I’m looking for.
Thanks for listening!
These reflections depend entirely on what you choose for the environment and the environment settings, and your camera placement…I’m not sure how much easier you expect it to be? Rendering itself is an entirely separate field of human endeavor from ‘modeling,’ that takes at least as much experience as modeling if you’re trying to get really realistic results. (Well, are you going for “photoreal” or are you going for “ad-quality product photography,” which is definitely NOT “realistic?”) What you’ve got here is as easy as it gets, but there’s absolutely going to be a learning curve.
There are approximately 5 zillion free HDRIs to be found on the Net, or–actually it’s more like use and HDRI PLUS this–you can make simple planes set as self-illuminated panels to move around to place the reflections exactly where you want with the intensity you want, I used to do that all the time for such renderings.
So get rid of the ground plane and use any of the studio environments that come with Rhino - there are several with plain, large lights besides the default one. Also add a couple of large planes with a dark material on behind your camera.
metallic_cylinder_shots.3dm (3.4 MB)
In this example I used the GemStudio environment, no ground plane, two planes with dark grey material and two rectangular lights.
