You may have noticed that there is still a considerable amount of "black" in the chrome. That's because my scene has nothing else in it.

If you cannot build an entire interior (a room) for your scene, you can fake it with an environment sphere. This is a gigantic sphere that surrounds your entire scene, and has a panoramic (360 degree) image mapped onto it. The best images are HDRI, because they capture the full dynamic range of the lighting in the scene, and it shows up great in reflections.

Here I've used an image of the interior of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. There are real lights in the image (in the ceiling) as well as stained glass windows. Because I have real lights to reflect from my scene now, I removed the Glossy node from the chrome shaders.

This looks way more real.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)