Help needed! This is a polished wooden Toy on a metal table.You could find this "toy" in designers shops here in Sweden. Maybe my fellow Scandinavians recognize it? Made with Wings3D. The background is a country house & garden that belongs to a friend of mine. I need help with the reflections in the wheel rims. How do I make these realistic and integrated with the rest of the image. I tried to place a big object behind the "camera" with a texture that I wished to reflec in the rims. This object however just just blocked the light. I played around with shadow setting but I could solve this. How do I do this? You can check this image in full size in the Bryce gallery: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=547282&Form.sess_id=687957&Form.sess_key=1069836709 If you wish to play around with it then you can download it from my site: [www.colacola.se](http://www.colacola.se) (Look under downloads) Hope anybody can help me out.

I know when I make a fake hdri, I set my hdri sphere (which would be your "big object" behind the camera) to "normal" then put both transparency dots on the pic texture, this will allow light to go through. I would also disable all the shadows on that material. Hmmm, lol, does that make any sense? There are a few ways to go about all this. AgentSmith

On reflections... Well the object, perhaps a square or "plane" object, behind the camera should work wonderfully. The trick is to turn shadows OFF for this object. You do this inside of the material editor, see the picture. This should turn off any shadow-casting. WHY it's right here, I don't know, it just is! When you're playing with volumetric clouds sometimes it helps to turn off Cast Shadows for preview rendering, especially. Hope this helps? Another way to do it is to use the same technque, but wrap your texture around the inside of a sphere, enclosing most of the scene but invisible anywhere else in the render...

hmmm.. I understand. I'll just have to figure out how to set transparency dots. thanks!

By the way, I really like your site, it's quick and potent and looks really clean! Great work.

Thanks!!!

how to set transparency dots; Just literally place your cursor in channel (column) "A" and go down to the "Transparent" (Row), then regular click. (If that's what you meant, lol) AS

ah ok.. hehe! Thought you meant something else like making specific parts of the texuture transparent..

I don't think transparency is the issue, in this case? I am not trying to contradict Agent Smith, but it doesn't seem to me to be the issue if it's just light that's not transmitting into your scene. BUT, these are the dots to which he was referring... In the Material Lab, are the channel dots for the transparency, or alpha... In this case, I just left it set to 'Blend Transparency', but either fuzzy or normal would work the same. They value and optics work off of the Alpha, or greyscale, middle channel for any given component. Except bump, which has it's own channel. The dot in the Color section for Transparency give it's shadows and internals the "A" component's colors... Blah blah, lots of words, pictures are better...

nah, not at all, I was just spouting that stuff out in case bazze wanted to try it.

Here is my try using zenith, blurry reflections, and a fake hdri dome (aka global reflection map)

thanks for all the tips! Here's the improved (I hope image). Changes: - Fake HDRI-map added (surrounding sphere that make the reflections integrate with the surronding) - 2D background removed - The ground is no longer flat but is now a high poly grid that I have crumbled a bit. - Bump maps added to ground - Bump maps added to to the wooden textures - Shadows from plant/tree addded Any comments?

Looking much better! Love the addition of the shadows over the ground and cars.

Aye, I think this one is much better, as well! Glad you got the global reflections and lighting down, I wish I could pull it off too!