Chrome and Indirect Illumination

I have a faucet that I would like to render with chrome as the
material. What is the trick to getting it to work with indirect
illumination? It's not necessary for me but I am struggling to get it
to look "right". The image looks washed out and not as detailed as if
it would look if I did not use indirect illumination.

TIA

KenM

 

You can thank Brian hill for this!

1) On the Illumination tab of the material set the reflectivity (or mirror)
up to it's highest setting

2) set the material color to Black. Strange but true. Chrome things are
really almost always 100% black. It's their reflectivity that make them
appear other colors.

3) MOST IMPORTANT - have something to reflect in the chrome. This can
easily be done by adding an image-based material to a spherical
'environment' scene wall - or just adding other things into the scene to
reflect in the object. If you check out the toaster on my site the key is
the room that is reflecting in it. this is really just a photo I found of a
kitchen that I turned into a material in PW2 and put on the spherical
environment of the scene.

I hope this helps. If not, send a copy of your rendering and I'd be happy
to check it out and offer some tips.

-brian
www.bxhdesigns.com

 

Forgot to add this to the last post

http://www.scottjbaugh.com/Desktop images/Bionicle Image4 - Direct.jpg

Regards,
Scott

 

http://www.scottjbaugh.com/Desktop images/Bionicle Image4 - Direct.jpg

Nice rendering. Brian's advice is valid. I think SolidWorks should change
the default from that light gray they use, to black.

I bet, with the default Chrome, your Bonicle was missing the deep black
and nice contrast that appears in your image.

Maybe they set it to gray so that if there is nothing to reflect, you don't
end
up with a black part that might confuse the first time PhotoWorks users.

Mike