As someone that isn’t terribly familiar with this material the first thing I did was Google some reference images.  I found several different looks to this material.  Some more reflective, some less reflective…some were more glossy than others, etc.  Example 01, Example 02, Example 03, Example 04

That being said overall it looks like a fairly basic glossy aluminum material (IMHO).  But of course I may be oversimplifying the material since I don’t have any in front of me at the moment.

To begin, the first thing to consider here is the scene environment.  As with any reflective material it will only look as good as what you give it to reflect.  So I setup the test scene with a nice early am/late pm panoramic HDR image.

From there I started on the alucobond material.  I used an A&D material and set it up in a basic glossy metal configuration like this:

I fired off a render with this setup and here’s that result:

It seems to look alright.  Perhaps a bit too new or shiny, but then again some of the reference image were more reflective and less glossy than others.  So this may work for some types.  Another thing I noticed about the alucobond material is that some of it appeared to have a clear coat type layer.  If you want that, then you can use this configuration as a base material in a blend/shellac material.

For my renders here I’m using iray.  Unfortunately, iray in 3ds Max currently does not offer a way to put a coating/layer on a material.  However, it’s not too difficult to achieve by rendering a black reflective layer and overlaying it onto the original render.  That’s exactly what I did for this next image:

Here’s a shot of the reflection render + mask for the alucobond materials only:

And a closeup render of the material with the “coating” overlaid in Photoshop.  TIP:  Be sure to add the reflection layer using an additive mode like screen or Linear Dodge (add).

That’s about it I guess.  Like I mentioned at the beginning, this may not be the exact look you’re after but it could be a good starting point.  For example, if you wanted a darker, more glossy look you could decrease the reflection glossiness and darken the diffuse color a bit for this:

While I used iray in my examples here you can recreate this with most any render engine.  Scenes like this are perfect for iray since it’s very quick for glossy reflections and exterior type scenes.  Regardless of the render engine you use please keep in mind how important the environment map is on reflective objects.

One last tip, you may also want to add a bit of noise/distortion to the panels since nothing is perfectly flat.

I’ll go ahead and warn you now, this is one of those topics that may get kinda fuzzy.  My primary goal here is to explain why HDR/EXR files may appear dark in a scene.  To start off let’s say you have a scene you’ve created and now you’re ready for lighting.  Typically a couple of common scenarios happen at this point.  You may add a daylight system with the mrSun/MrSky/mrPhysical Sky combination or jump straight to a HDR/EXR for illumination.  To begin with, let’s assume you start with the daylight system/mrSun/mrSky/mrPhysical Sky.

You fire off a render and get something like this:

Of course there will be slight variations to this based on your sun locations, etc.  Anyway, nothing wrong with the lighting setup here, especially if your goal is a clear sunny day.  However, after checking out your model in this type of environment you feel that you’d like to use a HDR/EXR file for the lighting instead of the mrSun/mrSky/mrPhysical Sky.  You assign the HDR/EXR file to the environment and/or a skylight or whatever method you choose and fire off another render and get this:

What the….

What went wrong?  In a word, exposure.  Your exposure control is configured for a very bright daylight scene.  Like this:

Typically, HDRs/EXRs that you have purchased or made do not default to the same intensity as the 3ds Max daylight system.  If they did they would probably be pure white when you viewed them in a typical image viewing program.  To help visualize this, if you disable the mrPhotographic Exposure control you’d probably see something similar to this if when you render the mrPhysical Sky vs. a HDR:

The mrPhysical Sky is super bright whereas the HDR/EXR looks spot on.  Now if you enable the mrPhotographic Expsoure control with the outdoor daylight setting you’d see something like this:

Now the mrPhysical Sky looks right, but the HDR/EXR file is waaaay under exposed.  What to do?  Well you have a couple of options but basically you can either adjust the exposure control settings or the output/intensity of the HDR/EXR file to give it the proper intensity value.

For example, keeping the mrPhotographic exposure on Outdoor Daylight preset but with the HDR file instead of the daylight system I could use the unitless physical scale value to compensate for the HDR/EXR intensity like this:

A render with that yields this:

Yaay!  Now the HDR/EXR file is visible.  BUT…there’s always a but right?  This setup isn’t a global setting that you can or should always use.  I say this because at 90k the exposure settings are waaay to high for the time of day of this particular HDR – (dusk) environment.  A problem would arise if I were to use this setup and wanted to add some lights to the scene I would need to boost their intensity unrealistically high before they would be visible at an exposure control EV value of 15.

How do you know what exposure settings to use with any HDRs/EXRs then?  Well, that’s the rub here since HDRs/EXRs are built from multiple exposures and taken at various times of day in various conditions, etc..  Hard to nail it down to one exposure value, especially so if you plan on adding other light sources to your scene.

There’s one ‘trick’ that I use though.  A lot of the HDRs/EXRs I have came with backplates.  Those backplates are typically exposed properly and you can use their EXIF data to obtain a working exposure value.

In windows I can view the file properties of an image and in the details section easily find the camera info like this one that came with the HDR I used above:

With that info in hand I go back into 3ds Max and enter the Shutter Speed, ISO, and f-stop info into the mrPhotographic Exposure control.

Then I can adjust the unitless physical scale value to something that provides a close approximation to what I’d expect.  For this particular HDR file 12,000 seemed to be fairly close to what I’d expect.

Of course it’s still a guesstimate, but with the backplate shutter/aperture/ISO info plugged into the mrPhotographic Exposure control I feel it’s somewhat close.  It should also provide more realistic results when lights are added to the scene (like IES lights).

So the bottom line here is that more than likely if you’ve tried to light a scene with a HDR/EXR file and it turns out black or overly dark it’s probably because of a conflict in your exposure control settings and the intensity of the HDR/EXR file.  You can adjust the exposure settings and/or the intensity of the HDR to help resolve the issue.

As with anything in 3ds Max there are many other ways to tackle this.  I’m not in any way saying this is the perfect method, it’s not really…but it works for me and the scenes I work with.  You may have your own preferred method for accurately adjusting the intensity of the HDR/EXR files for use with exposure control like not using exposure control at all and rendering out in linear format, etc..

NOTE: For the example images posted here I used an Evermotion scene.

• HDR Light Studio version 3 has been released.  It contains some great new features on top of an already excellent application.  FWIW I use this application in my own work and find it saves me a LOT of time.

• GREYSCALEGORILLA – While I do not personally use Cinema 4D I find a lot of inspiration from Nick’s blog/tutorials/posts/etc..  I also enjoy and admire his teaching methods.  He’s very relaxed and natural with smooth delivery.  His site is not only Cinema 4D topics, if you use After Effects you’ll appreciate his site as well.  Be sure to check it out!

• http://toddd3d.blogspot.com/ - My good friend and speed modeling guru Todd Daniele has created a blog.  He’s posting some speedsculpt video captures and it’s great to see how he works.

• http://blog.irayrender.com/ - The iray developers blog.  Great to see some insight into where iray development is heading and what it’s capable of.  Would be nice if readers were allowed to post questions or comments though.

• http://www.m3dhdr.com/ – New site for purchasing HDRs with a couple of free samples also available.

• iray manager script version 2 – Thorsten Hartmann has updated the great iray manager script again to include some new features and improved workflow.  Thanks Thorsten for these updates.

• http://www.hdri-locations.com/ – The website where Thomas Suurland sells some absolutely beautiful HDRs & backplates.  Be sure to check out some of the stunning environments & locations he’s visited and captured!

• http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/louis – Louis Marcoux blog with lot’s of great 3ds Max tips-n-tricks.

• http://jamiesjewels.typepad.com/ – Lot’s of useful 3ds Max / CG information on Jamie’s blog.

• http://www.ronenbekerman.com/ – Lot’s of great articles and lot of inspirational work.

• http://www.digitaltutors.com – I recently signed up at their site and have been watching various training videos as time allows.  I’ve found it very helpful to have such a large collection of videos for so many different applications close at hand.  Great for cross-training on various applications.

Options:

- Resources

- Interactivity Performance (optimize Active Shader Performance)

- extendet progressive Options

- FireFly Filtering

- Matte Ground

- Background

- Clay Render

- Save/Load Options

Many thanks to Thorsten for this update and his continued efforts to provide great tools to the community like this.  It is greatly appreciated.

What is it?  The hemisphere environment mode in iray basically creates a hemispherical dome where the bottom is squished and uses the HDR like a texture map.  Instead of using the default infinite environment you can enable this mode and give the illusion of your geometry in the HDR.  It’s a neat looking ‘trick’ and especially cool when used in combination with the iray active shade mode.

Below are some images to help illustrate this mode.  The first image is a typical render using the default iray infinite environment (in 3ds Max).  The geometry is in the “middle” area of the HDR as it’s stretched around the scene.  Therefore you’d need to take this render and composite the geometry onto a back plate or build geometry in the scene, etc..

In the next image I have rotated the camera around and you can see how the HDR environment & mesh do not align since the environment is such a large sphere.

In the next image I have enabled the hemisphere environment mode and set a size for it and it’s “ground” texture.

Pretty neat eh?  The bottom of the HDR is flattened and it now appears as though the mesh is sitting on the road in the HDR.  Of course there are some drawbacks, like the distortion of the ground.  Still though, IMHO it’s a neat looking effect.  In the following images I’ll rotate the camera around to show how it tracks in this mode.

As I move the camera around, the objects act as though they are in the environment now.    I can imagine this hemisphere environment mode might be very helpful for preliminary design looks (especially with active shade), quick renders, or even in some cases final renders.

The iray manager script has this environment mode as an option, but I’ve not had any luck in getting it to work from within the manager.  I think it’s because some of the control points are missing (like ground texture scale).  Anyway, I put those string options into a simple maxscript.  It doesn’t have a GUI, sorry I’m just not that far along with maxscript yet.  Plus it should probably be included in the iray manager script anyway.

DOWNLOAD SCRIPT

Usage:  Setup your HDR scene as you normally would (create/import geometry, assign textures to geometry, create a camera, assign spherical HDR to environment, disable default lighting).  Run the script, fire up iray active shade mode and have fun.

You can open the script to see the string commands I used, modify the scale/size, etc..  And to find out more about what the strings do (and other strings), see the “iray String Options” link here at the irayrender.com website.

UPDATE (12/15/11) – A few more examples using the hemisphere environment with various HDRs…MORE EXAMPLES.

Other notes:

In the script I have the environment set to 4k resolution (4096) to help make the HDR a bit sharper.  You may want to decrease that to 2048 or less depending on how much GPU memory you have available (higher res = more memory used).  This 4096 res environment will also probably load slower, so if load time becomes an issue you can reduce the environment resolution in the script to 2048 or less for faster load times.

Keep in mind the scene lighting is still generated from the infinite environment outside of this hemisphere dome.  This is also evident in glass refractions, as it will still refract the infinite environment and not this hemispherical dome.

Mustang model used in this example from arte-3d.

HDR used in examples from HDRI-Locations.com.  Some of the best HDR’s & backplates I’ve used.