Lighting and shadow attempt

[guitarboy]

Gday mighty 3d people, just having a play with lighting and just wondering what peoples thoughts are thus far. All crits welcome, tho i havent worried too much about materials, more just lighting and shadows.

 

at the moment im using a HDR image in combo with a max direct light. once i get time, ill update it with wall lights, etc, and try and make it look pretty.

 

thanks heaps.

[Stephen Thomas]

Nice image mate! Don't you just love HDRs? So easy to change the mood of a scene.

 

Just a couple of quick thoughts: base of wall / floor interface looks a little artificial, maybe have a slight reveal/shadowgap at base of wall to seperate elements slightly. Adding a fresnel falloff to the reflection map will help floor material reflect more naturally.

 

Keep posting once you develop it a bit further.

[guitarboy]

Thanks for the comments, im yet to throw alot of the detail into the pic yet, but i do really like the sound of the shadowgap, ill put that in for sure.

 

also about the reflection, i am already using a frenzel fall off map with a bump map in the white map section and leaving the black one as is, and thats the results im getting. any tips on how to improve this???

[mahorela]

your getting that nice variation from the HDRI on this one. instead of white on your falloff map try a darker grey to limit the reflection a little, maybe add just a touch of glossiness to the reflection? a bit of experimentation is needed with that.

 

great start

[Stephen Thomas]

I agree that the floor looks a little too reflective, but I would leave the falloff as it is and change the default IOR of 1.6 to something else first.

 

Polished stone should have an IOR of around 1.075. Lowering the IOR increases the Fresnel effect. Depending on the results you may also want to reduce the overall reflection level as well. Polished stone would generally be about 30% reflective, but since you're using a map I'm not sure how that affects things.