How to get nice reflective metallic look

Mosk the Scribe

Hi. I need to get a bright, shiny silver look for part of a screw in Carrara 8.5 pro.

I know (or think I recall) that the metallic shaders rely on the environment in the background - but I just want the screw rendered with a transparent background - nothing else showing up.

Would a shiny HDRI map be what I need for this? (and if so, do I just place that in the backdrop and add some lights - or do I place a giant sphere around my object and put the HDRI map on that)?

Other ways?

Thanks for any help.

JoeMamma2000

Yeah, reflective surfaces pretty much rely on having stuff to reflect in order to look like reflective surfaces.

Professional photographers working in a studio often don't have cool reflective environments to give their surfaces cool reflective highlights, so they make their own. Some use big white sheets that give a nice diffuse reflection. These are popular with automobiles, and gems and other reflective stuff.

When you're talking about a screw, it's generally not very polished and reflective unless you have one of those chrome plated ones. But even then you don't really need a complex environment to give some simple highlights.

So you might consider just inserting a simple plane in your scene, off camera, and give it some glow or just bright white color, and orient it so that the screw reflects it.

Just a thought....

evilproducer

You can use an hdri in the scene's background to provide a reflection and still not have it show visible by using one of these methods:

1) Enable the Alpha Channel option in the render room. If you use PS, then you will probably want to leave the pre-multiplied option off.

2) If you do not want to composite the image in an image editor, you could add your hdri to the scene's Background, and add a color, color gradient or image map to the scene's Backdrop.

Backdrops will cover up a background and they won't reflect.

However, Joe is very right, in that a typical zinc coated screw does not reflect much. You may be better using the Highlight and Shininess settings in the screw's shader to get the metallic effect. The silver armor in this render uses absolutely no reflections.