On 9/12/2017 7:53 AM, Norbert Kern wrote:
> Personally I love metal materials, but it's difficult to predict their behavior
> in several scene setups.
> Metals depend on their environment, reflections are more important than diffuse
> settings. Metals show sharp contrasts between shadows and highlights.
> 
> Therefore I prefer hdr lighting or at least a combination of a normal
> lightsource and hdr

yep i'm a metal materials fan as well ... and yes you are correct adding 
hdr is definitely the way to go because it makes for plenty of eye candy 
in the reflections

> Here I took the nice rolly_sphere together with a more polished silvery metal
> material:

lol ... i have a silver version too. copper looks pretty cool as well. 
i'm working on a glass version but there have been some challenges. 
something opaque behaves better in that the shape of the object isn't 
lost. to that end i've been working on a milk glass version ... i'll 
post if i'm able to produce something worthy. thanks for sharing!!!

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On 9/12/2017 7:53 AM, Norbert Kern wrote:
> Therefore I prefer hdr lighting or at least a combination of a normal
> lightsource and hdr.

here's a link to some pretty good hdr images:
http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

i've been getting a lot of mileage out of papermill ruins E but playa is 
also pretty cool. the apartment at the top of the list is great for an 
inside env.

i prefer the ones where you can actually see the sun or light source. 
basically here's how i place the light source. with the image on a small 
sphere and the camera somewhere -z ... i rotate the sphere until the sun 
spot lines up with 0*y then i use a crude grid at <0,0,0> that i rotate 
in the x dir to get the elevation. a few hints ... the papermill ruins E 
lines up at y*33 and x*30.5 so i use those as offsets in my env and 
light source setup:

#declare Environment =
sphere { 0, 1 hollow on
   material {
     texture { uv_mapping
       pigment {
         image_map {
           hdr "PaperMill_E_3k.hdr"
           map_type 0
           interpolate 2
           once
           }
         }
       finish { ... }
       }
     interior { ior 1.0 }
     }
   rotate y*33
   no_shadow
   }

#local R_Fact = 30;
#local S_Fact = 30;

considering the above the light source is initially placed <0,0,-29.9> 
then transformed like this:

object { Environment scale S_Fact rotate y*R_Fact }
object { Key_Light rotate x*30.5 rotate y*R_Fact }

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