Procedural Information
As with most automobile design we’re going to be rendering a high gloss surface which is very reflective of it’s surroundings. A “slick” finish allows the reflections to behave in a predictable and orderly fashion. You can think of the car’s body as acting almost like a mirror, except the reflections, rather than being in full color are made up conventionally by a tonal range of our car’s inherent color. There are exceptions of course; generally the darker a car’s color and the closer you get to gloss black, the more actual surrounding color is reflected. Now of course a car is not flat like a mirror, it has many compound curves and angled surfaces. If you’ve ever played “bumper pool”, you can then imagine standing right before our subject auto and “banking” cue balls off its three-dimensional body panels (without “english” of course). The angle from which the ball strikes will produce an opposite and equal angle dependent upon the point where you strike a small facet of the car’s surface - that opposite direction “into infinity” is where that portion of the surface is receiving its reflective information. Actually, understanding a cars reflections with our “pool game” analogy might be better understood by hitting another cue ball floating in space - a ball striking a stationary rounded surface can send its resultant path in almost all possible directions, not just paths confined to the pool table’s surface. Up, down, sideways and back at ya, so to to speak.
For the purpose of our demo, we’ll be rendering our car in an exterior setting. Positioning your design in an interior location can be much more complicated but in general, a similar set of circumstances as follows: Remember our horizon line - the sky above, the earth below? The sky is reflecting more light and therefore those areas that are above the horizon receive a lighter tone (more light) - while below our horizon line, the earth is absorbing a lot of the light and some items are in shadow resulting in darker tones and more of our car’s intrinsic color being reflected back to our eye. Below the horizon (and just at the horizon line where the environment is generally the darkest) is where we see most of our car’s actual paint color... in our case purple, “right out of the can”. Think of that area as though it were shaded from glare and with less reflective interference you’re seeing more of the car’s true color, somewhat akin to our window rendering reference in Step 6.
 As an added bonus, if you’ve stayed with it and followed this sidebar, you might find you’re now able to render chrome too. The sky above the horizon - the earth below. Chrome has no inherent color and is merely a mirror of it’s surroundings. By our example to the left you’ll see a desert environment reflected in the face of our letter “C”, even in it’s outer beveled edge. This cliché with graded sky tones above a dark horizon and a sandy ground tone gradation below is a perfect example of a simple environment consistently used by many professional designers to render reflections. Bet you’ll notice the use of this “device” everywhere from now on. |
