A gun wielding robot and a plea for vray help

[hartleym]

hello all..
This post has 2 parts

1) A plea for assistance with VRAY rendering

2) An almost finished WIP that I have modelled while experimenting with VRAY and inspired by extreme frustration that it is not being kind to me...
I plan to let him loose on all the pc's I can find with VRAY installed

1)

I've started attempting to surface and render my nissan skyline using VRAY and I'm having some troubles
(i was originally using brazil but I found it's GI capabilities pretty crap)

As a starting point for learning I have been looking at Majestic's video tutorial on VRay lighting and also experimenting with his silver car paint shader
(And Majestic, if you read this post - you are a very generous guy for helping out noobs like me!!)

I have set up my lighting scheme the same way as described in the tute, but when I do a render the paint shader looks very washed out and mostly white (see attached pic)
I also tried to replicate Majestic's tute using the simple sphere with a reflective vray material on it and had a similar problem...my rendered image looks a lot more washed out and instead of the ground plane being the default grey color I assigned to it, it is pure white

As I understand it, the lighting in the scene comes from using a white enviroment background, and whatever lights are present in a default scene without altering any lighting options

The only thing that makes any difference is to change the background color to black (or grey) instead of white, but renders like this look odd as well especially where the car touches the ground plane

I have been doing a lot of reading about vray and GI in general, and tried many different settings but I just can't seem to solve the problem...
I am using max7 and vray 1.45.70 which has slightly different rollout options than version 1.45.20 discussed in Majestic's tutorial, but surely that wouldnt make a difference.....

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on where I am going wrong I would be eternally grateful!!

2) The angry droid

[majestic]

if there are no lights in the scene, max will use "default lights"
you dont want that, so 2 ways:

-stick an omni and turn it off
-uncheck this option in vray

[hartleym]

Thanks HEAPS Majestic!!!!! You are a total legend

[Micke™]

i really like the botscene. good work

[Autokrafte]

Yeah, the bot looks pretty cool.

And about Vray: Don't feel alone, i've been pulling my hair out over it!!!!
I wish someone will make a tutorial for it specific to car scene setup and rendering.

Maybe someone from above will smell a hint and make us amateurs one :wink:

[Dennispls]

too bad the steyr TMP doesnt look very accurate
the robot itself looks great reminds me of the strwars things

[Micke™]

Originally Posted by Autokrafte

Maybe someone from above will smell a hint and make us amateurs one :wink:

Thanks but im really an amateur myself

[Autokrafte]

Hehehehe.....I know mate, I was aiming that at majestic :lol: