[simmsimaging]

The small one doesn't have to be close up, but if your emitter is bleaching out the floor and not doing the trick for your material it's prob a material issue right? If it's a highly reflective material for the lettering then it won't matter how much light you throw at it - it has to be coming from the right angle to light it up.


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[iandavis]

Yeah, make the faces very slightly curved. Otherwise you will have a heck of a time getting decent reflection/highlights to show up.

Just think how much easier this would be if maxwell could select which objects emitters could light. choose an emitter, uncheck the sphere. done (a la Lightwave). save hours eh? Or maybe an 'ags' type solution for glowing? glowing that doesn't emit light? All these things are not 'realistic' but in the course of everyone's job as cg illustrators these unrealistic tricks are kinda required

I would also try rendering the elements individually over a black background and attempting to composite them in Photoshop. The only thing you would be missing would be refraction, but that might not be an issue. You could always generate alpha channels from your application. I often need to resort to this. (sad though really)

[w i l l]

Obviously Maxwell can render out an alpha and i've just read in the manual that it can render out shadows but how would i just render reflections on the ball?

I want to have a go at compositing images together as i'm not getting good results the other ways - now i've got a nice white 3d logo and an orange coloured ball with reflections/hdri on it and i need to combine them so that it looks like the logo is inside the ball - is there a simple way to do this? Does it just involve layers in Photoshop... havent done compositing before.

[KurtS]

It can easily be done in Photoshop, but it's a bit sad that it is so hard to get the result you want in Maxwell. There should be a simple solution that results in a perfect Maxwell result!

[w i l l]

But the perfect Maxwell result is a real life result and graphic designers sometimes want things that are physically a bit weird.

So can i render out just reflections or do i just use the 2 layers (ball and logo) and play around with it in Photoshop?

[w i l l]

So can i just save render save the reflections and nothing else.... anyone? Otherwise trying to select just HDRI reflections from a render could be difficult.

[simmsimaging]

Easiest way that I know to get the reflections (and it's probably not the easiest) is to just drop a black material on your object with an appropriate glossiness and render that. Comp it in photoshop as a lighten or screen layer etc. and you should get the highlight/reflections in there. Works okay for me - it's the only way I know.

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[w i l l]

Ok thanks - i'll give it a try.

[iandavis]

I was gunna suggest that... there is one serious flaw that you need to be aware of with that...

Any bright objects will not reflect in other objects as their true color, but of course as black objects. So for object-reflect-world it works wonders, but for object-reflect-other-objects and world... well, you would only get the sky and reflect black objects only.

but it's good enough for most situations to add realism.

[w i l l]

I've roughly put three parts together but on one monitor the ball looks squashed. Does the ball in this image look round?

[NicoR44]

is the ball round but one monitor set up wrong

That's it!!


The ball looks great now!!!!

[w i l l]

Well if Nico says so, i'm happy.... its alright, just check it in Photoshop.

[simmsimaging]

Looks round to me.
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