Help with outdoor render

[Alyosha]

Hey,

 

I'm having this head-acheing problems with exterior renders. I have a couple of flat surfaces (photovoltaic facade) that I would like to be *shiny*, and no matter what material i use they just turn out flat???

 

If i use the same material (i.e. car paint or shiny metal type) on a spherical object it of course works properly and looks really nice, which kinda makes sense, too.

 

But the question is how to trick vray into making flat surfaces nice and shiny? I want that sun-reflected glow on them as you would see it in real life on flat shiny surfaces.

 

Any suggestions on how to do that and how to generally liven up the eksterior renders? I dont have any probs with interiors but exteriors are a real headache for me to do properly:-(

 

here is the concept work, the facades are the front one on tower composed of multiple photovoltaic blocks that move around, on the front side of the front object is the normal photovoltaic panels and i cant get neither to interact properly with the lighting

 

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[Devin Johnston]

If you want specular reflections you need to move your sun into a position that will allow the glass to reflect it. The problem you are having is your glass has noting to reflect so no matter how reflective you make it it won't look like glass until there is something in front of it. Alternatively you could use a map of clouds or a landscape to give the illusion that there is something around your building.

[Alyosha]

dude, it hasnt occured to me at all that i should move sun into position or find an angle where it reflects it...omg this is a whole new level of being stupid:-) Thanks a lot:-)))))) the sun reflection kinda works now:-)

[Brodie Geers]

Alternatively, you could use an HDRI for reflections. This would give you some nice cloud reflections as well, instead of just a bright sun reflection.

 

-Brodie

[Alyosha]

Hey, yeah I actually plan on using hdri for reflection/fraction, i'm still not convinced thats all the options i have though, unfortunately i dont know many since i havent done many exteriors so far.

[Brodie Geers]

Well, I think at the very least, you need something to reflect. I've run into that problem many times. To solve that problem you can basically move the sun, use an hdri, create more geometry (3d or 'billboards'), or any/all of the above. There may be a couple other tricks out there (I know in Mental Ray you can put a map into the Reflection slot, not sure about Vray) but those will give you the best quality.

 

Once you've got something to reflect, only then can you really start further tweaking your reflective material to make sure it looks right.

 

-Brodie

[Alyosha]

Yeah i thought of that but in this case there is not going to be any additional geometry, and ye in vray you have reflection maps as well as environment map slots..but sometimes i just want that "make shiny" button, would it be so hard to implement it?;P