Since a lot of people have been inquiring about the lighting and the studio setup in my renders, I've decided to whip up a quick outline of the techniques I used.
The scene setup
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Physical environment
The visible environment consists of the three planes you see with the white-black gradient. They all have the same material:
Diffuse: Gradient Ramp, light greyish blue to black Radial gradient. Opacity: Gradient Ramp, white to black Radial gradient. Bump Map: Noise, Fractal.
The two backdrops (the L-shaped planes on the right and left) do absolutely nothing other than provide a nice background in the final renders. They're set so they are invisible to reflections, and they don't cast/receive shadows. The ground plane has the default properties, meaning it can be reflected and shadows can be casted onto it.
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Lighting
The lighting was done through one Omni Light and VRay's GI.
The Omni (directly above the car) uses VrayShadow with Area Shadows checked. In the interior shot, another Omni was used to light up the otherwise pitch black areas of the scene. This light did not cast shadows and had a very low intensity.
Fill lighting was done with GI. I used the same HDRI map for this as for reflections (explained below).
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Reflections
After trying other methods, such as the good old white-plane-above-the-car method, I turned to HDRI. The map I used is of my own concoction, and I'm reluctant to share it.
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Materials
Many seem to think the car paint has some special properties. There isn't (sorry to disappoint you!). It's your textbook car paint:
Diffuse: Grey Reflection: Falloff, Fresnel, dark grey to light grey, Bump Map: Noise, Fractal
That's it. The lighting and the environment did the rest.
The leather material used in the interior is a bit more complex:
Diffuse: Grey Reflection: Perpendicular/Parallel, black to dark grey Bump Map: Noise, Turbulence
The following enables blurry reflections (applicable only to VrayMtl):
(Basic parameters rollout, Reflection) Refl. glossiness: 0.8 Max depth: 1 Use Interpolation: Checked
Almost all materials in the scene are derivatives of those two explained above, e.g. The metal materials are essentially a shinier version of the car paint and the weather stripping uses the leather material with black in diffuse.
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You'll have noticed that I haven't included many specifics values for the settings mentioned. This is intentional. Understanding what each option does and how it affects your render is essential to your learning. Copying and pasting my numbers (or anyone else's) isn't going to help you in that regard. There's no secret behind the process other than simply spending time tweaking things here and there. I hope this overview gave you a good idea of how my scene was set up, and I hope it helps you in your future renders.
Poyin Chuang
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the head is round for ideas not to stand in the corner. - (typneun)
I'm having a problem, though. It might not occur in C4D, but with max I'm having the trouble that when I use an HDRI for reflections, it shows in the background where I don't want it to be seen .
I'm using vrayHDRI-mat and drop it into the environment slot in the renderer. Does anybody have an idea how I can overcome this? Or am I overlooking something?
not sure if this is exactly what you mean but if you drop something in the environment slot, it'll logically show up in your renders. that's usually the point of enviro.
Hm, no, sorry, I was wiritng rubbish. What I meant was this:
1. I didn't drop the hdri in the environment-slot but in the "reflection/refraction etc environment"-slot in vray renderer.
2. The hdri doesn't show in the background, but somehow it shows on my background-L-drop-plane, it's lighting it up it seems. Which it actually shouldn't do, right? I mean so far I didn't even use it in the GI slot.
Let me just make some quick renders to illustrate what I mean.
Just a minute. brb
Edit: Ok, here we go. 1st is with hdri in refl/refr-slot but with no plane in the background. 2nd is with hdri in refl/refr-slot and with plane in background. 3rd is without hdri but with plane in background ... All other settings are as explained in the tut.
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...sorry not yet 
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