These all look really nice.

Quote - the big ball is 100% ambient white, and about 4 times the size of the car. and about 4 times the hieght of the car above the ground. the white plane is also 100% ambient white, and sits just below the ground plane (which is used as a shadow catcher)

I find this thread very interesting. I'm new to the light stuff so can you expand on what you said above a little more? How to you make a "light ball"? Also, how do you know the size of the car in order to determine making the ball 4 times that size, or 4 times the height etc. Sorry if this is all basic to some of you, but I'm just very recently getting into what I consider more advanced things in Poser. For along time all I did was play "Dress up doll" and now I'm trying to learn more stuff.

Well, The big ball (or light ball as you call it) is a High Res Ball from propsPrimitives. I changed the material to 100%ambient WHITE. As for getting the size right, load up the car you want to render, zoom the camera out, and then use the SCALE dial in the properties panel to scale up the ball until it looks about 4 times the length of the car, to make things easier, you might want the scale DOWN the y axis after you have the size right, to squish the ball, so that it does not take up so much room. The ball itself does not produce any light, but it looks like a light when reflected on the car. does this help?

Yes, thank you :)

Awesome work. Thank you for the tips.

Just a couple of questions for ya Templar... 1. When in Polytrans, did you rename the material zones? And if so, could you post a couple of screenies showing how? Or a bit of a tutorial on how? 2. Concerning the poser paint shader, what are the steps to doing it? I can see by the image that you've got just about everything interconnected, but just how did you arrive at this? :) 3. Did you use P4 renderer or FireFly? 4. I still haven't gotten my cookie dagnabit! :) Thanks again! Blade

Fistly load your model into POLYTRANS

Under the SELECTOR, click the DROP DOWN BOX, and choose SURFACES (MATERIALS)

Re the "metal-flake" thing...here's where I'm at. I've got fBm nodes feeding into a color_ramp node, which is using a cellular node (although that's in no way crucial, it's just what I used) as its input...the output from the color-ramp goes into Specular_Color, mainly because it gives some degree of control over the eventual blending with templargfx's basic setup.

Comments are extremely welcome as I know bugger-all about cars, and even less about the paint jobs they get. ~lol~

The main issue I am having with the fleck-effect is that this setup uses no real amount of specular rendering, the highlights are created from the reflections. this causes problems, because you cannot (as far as I have been able to figure out) use any type of spot type effect on the reflected highlights. now that probably makes no sense, but nevermind LOL. another problem I have encountered is that in order to get the spot node's spots small enough to give a realistic effect, about 0.00025 spot size, the node goes hay-wire. You want the flecks to be so small, that when viewing the car from distance (like say the distance in your render) the flecks are visible individually, but just give a highlight to the cars body.

click on the NAME of the material you want to rename, a context-menu will appear, choose RENAME

THEN TYPE IN THE NEW NAME OF THE SURFACE. now of course, the problem comes when you have no idea what the surface is for. PolyTrans does not have (as far as I know, a surface visualisation mode. 1 way would be to change the color of the surface before renaming it. another way is to split the model up according to materials (1 object per material). or you could load it into poser, find out what each surface is, then rename them.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2568570

Because I am vain! and I like attention LOL, I have started a new thread! seriously, I have totally re-worked the node setup, and I think it works much better now, so I have started a new thread. just click the link

bkmk

Bookmark

No need to bookmark this thread, it and a whole bunch of other things are in the sticky bookmarks thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2722867

bagginsbill made a car paint shader.
but if you are using gamma corrected shaders you need a GC car shader. the orb shader is like plastic or car paint. i used it for a car and it looked incredible. in the package you also get glass so its perfect.