[John Truso]

I am trying to render a line of door levers shown on some various wooden backgrounds. Any edges that are 90 degrees from the wood will only reflect the wood background and become almost indistinguishable. Is there a way to have the wood background and not have the handle reflect it?

[JDHill]

Does the handle material have any roughness? Also, SketchUp drawings also tend to be very blocky -- to increase realism, have you tried applying small fillets or chamfers to any sharp edges? Overall, it is difficult to theorize exactly what you may be dealing with, without seeing a reference, so it may help if you post an image (just upload one to imageshack or similar, and link to it using the [img][/img] bbcode tags).

[John Truso]

[JDHill]

Thanks, that helps.

Is there a way to have the wood background and not have the handle reflect it?

Technically, you can right-click the background (provided it's a group or component), go to the Maxwell sub-menu, and set Hide from Reflections & Refractions to Enabled. So, yes, it's possible to do that, but I don't imagine it will yield a particularly realistic or appealing result. It seems more that the image mainly suffers from lack of contrast due to uniformity of the scene lighting; personally, I would try disabling the environment and using some artificial lighting (basically, setting up a studio shot). I'm not sure what you're looking for, though, so perhaps that's not an option.

[John Truso]

Are there any examples online for how to set up a studio shot in Maxwell for Sketchup? Do people share their complete setups for types of desired rendering outputs? Such as a tabletop photo studio example?

[JDHill]

I don't know of any off-hand, I know I've seen people build those for use with Maxwell before, but I don't think it was in SketchUp. There's a thread here, showing the construction of some studio lighting in Cinema 4D. I do find some models (like this one) by searching "lightbox" on the 3D Warehouse, but those will likely vary in terms of quality/usefulness. If I have to do things like this myself, it is usually pretty application-specific, so as I say, I look to the photography world to see what works best, and then emulate that in Maxwell.

[Fernando Tella]

I also think illumination has to be fixed.

Lowering Nd value could also aid a bit. As Nd goes down, reflections will get darker and will help in visually separate its surface from the reflected one.

[John Truso]

Thank you all so much for the help. Im sure I will have more questions as I get deeper into Maxwell.