HOME | DD

Description
yep, it's that robot again...
but its for a reason: the thing is so smooth and therefor perfect for lighting tests

when working with hdri-illumination only, you have to create highlights with reflections, because you don't have any actual lighsources for the specular highlights.
so this is what i tried here: getting nice, bright highlights (like in a standard 3-point light-setup with a strong backlight) while still getting a balanced light distribution from the HDRI.... and since illumination and reflection map have to match (looks odd when the bright spots in the reflections aren't in the same direction as the bright areas in the light setup), you're kind of stuck with using the same map for both tasks.

since the hdri i used here (tweaked a bit, though) was from some dude's balcony view, it had quite a lot of detail stuff i didnt want to see in the reflections. So i blurred it pretty strongly for the reflection map but left it detailed for the illumination, so the light distribution would still have sufficient contrast.

Well, i liked the clinically clean look of it, so i rendered this high quality version of it (over 1.2 million polygons)

Description
yep, it's that robot again...
but its for a reason: the thing is so smooth and therefor perfect for lighting tests

when working with hdri-illumination only, you have to create highlights with reflections, because you don't have any actual lighsources for the specular highlights.
so this is what i tried here: getting nice, bright highlights (like in a standard 3-point light-setup with a strong backlight) while still getting a balanced light distribution from the HDRI.... and since illumination and reflection map have to match (looks odd when the bright spots in the reflections aren't in the same direction as the bright areas in the light setup), you're kind of stuck with using the same map for both tasks.

since the hdri i used here (tweaked a bit, though) was from some dude's balcony view, it had quite a lot of detail stuff i didnt want to see in the reflections. So i blurred it pretty strongly for the reflection map but left it detailed for the illumination, so the light distribution would still have sufficient contrast.

Well, i liked the clinically clean look of it, so i rendered this high quality version of it (over 1.2 million polygons)