Hifi box, materials...

[nexusbird]

Hey, well at the moment I'm making some pretty cool stuff, but over all my materials are letting my models down so much its becoming sinful now.

I'm basically trying to make a chrome-ish type of hifi box, i do have a reference of it.

My lighting setup is a box with the sides and top cut out, and a vray light added over each hole, i have my object in, i did some test renders and they came out awesome, but when i try render my hifi it just looks so bad!.

was wondering if anyone could help with material creating of what to look for and how to gain realistic good materials. it might be my lighting i dunno.

"the reference pic is for the material look only, not the model"

[MStandar]

Could you tell us what render software you use.

Some tutorials:
http://www.3d-palace.com/xenomorphic...ushedmetal.htm

If you use vray you could follow this tutorials to get a nice material for volume knobs:
http://www.evermotion.org/index.php?...fold=exclusive

Originaly made fo brazil rio but it should work with most render engines:
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_educat...shed_metal.htm

[Kage]

Without using HDRI's for this kind of object, I find lighting them very hard...

With standard lighting, your trying to find a sweet spot. Maybe a linear fall off, between white and dark grey, possibly diagnally across the object, by using maybe a lit plane with a gradient.

For the brushed metal, either use Photoshop, and create some noise, make it black and white, and use motion blur on it, or use a Noise map in 3DS Max, and stretch the UV's.

[nexusbird]

im using max 2009, with vray 1.5.0, yeah i cant use hdri i follow some tuts but it doesnt turn out great at all its like just overkill ;\.