As you can see above, this is the final image. It took 15 mins to achieve this look with a Dual Xeon 3.0 and 2GB ram. In this small tutorial I will show you my lighting and Mental Ray rendering settings through which I achieve this final look.

Here is the scene layout in 3dsmax (I use version 9)



The main idea for this image was to have soft shadows and realism...So I used Area Lights, I placed two Area Lights and a Skylight which is not fancy, didn’t touch parameters of Skylight... (Skylight is needed for Final Gather)

Usually, for reflections, HDR images are cool but for this situation HDR is useless. Environment was lit quite enough to compete with HDR lighting or reflections.



Scene scale is one of the most important thing when you work with both area lights and GI, in some situations you have to do some trial & error to catch the mood , I made some trials too.





I left the walls open behind the camera, so environment color can pass to the scene and reflected on the car body and the rest...I put a gradient ramp on a slot, selected spherical environment mapping and choose this for Max’s environment...It’s always better to use a gradient ramp to mimic atmosphere..In this case environment color is not seen well on the scene but it helps a lot for the progress...



Here is the most powerful stuff, Exposure Control; it’s again related to the scene scale and units, there is no standard lighting setup for each scene..Exposure control helps you a lot when you have dark images and fixes the rest if you don’t want to play light’s parameters a lot…



I have used default settings for GI and “Hi” preset for the Final Gather...Basic color correction applied in Photoshop for the final image. I hope you enjoyed this small making of stuff…