[pixel_monkey]

Software used: Maya and Photoshop.
Render engine: Mental Ray

Here's one of my personal projects that I actually got it done. The whole point of this project was to learn lighting and rendering realistically with Mental Ray. The car model was pre-built for 3D Max with basic shaders. Since I'm not familiar with 3D Max, I had it exported to Maya, rebuilt some surfaces, and recreated a brand new shading network so it works better with Mental Ray. The car took about 4 hours to render with motion blur in 1080HD and comped in Photoshop. Location of the picture is in Death Valley, CA if anyone's wondering. Now onto my glass and liquid project.

[Dave.Cox]

Nicely done, pixel monkey. I think that your lighting and shadows looks great. You might consider adding some rotational blur to the wheels to make them appear to be turning, rather than stationary, to go with the motion blur that you added to the road. But other than that, I like it.

[pixelzombie]

it seems as if the front of the car should be darker than the back...

[pixel_monkey]

Thanks for the feedbacks fellas. I redid the motion blur to include the rubber of the tire and adjusted the lights more closer to the direction of the sun in the scene.

[pixelzombie]

i think you also need to lighten the back..my eye gets drawn to the fact that a light source appears to be illuminating the fender on the passenger side but the shadows on the mountain suggest that the light source is higher and to the right of the vehicle...

[pixel_monkey]

You're right on the indirect light source there. On top of the main light that I used to mimic the sun, I also put an area light at each corner of the car to make some of the materials to show, such as the logo and the rims. Thanks for pointing that out. I usually use this light setup to show my 3D models against a solid color background. A sun light and something that mimics the indirect light source from the sky would be more appropriate for this scene. I'll explore more on the outdoor setup. Time in the desert is strange. I took this pic before 10am at about 3000 ft above see level. The sun really not as high as it looks.

[pixel_monkey]

After many tries with the lighting setup, I decided to get rid of all the lights in the scene and used just one HDR image for this new setup. I wrapped the HDR image around a sky dome, using the hot spot of the HDR image to act as the sun and set it very close to the position of the sun in the image based on the shadows, and using the rest of the HDR image to act as the secondary light source coming from the sky. Here's the result.