Help with lighting

defectedsaint

I've been working on this render literally all day. It should be fairly simple but I can't get it to do what I want. Lights do not seem to affect anything in the scene. Yes, I have scene lighting on but no matter what kind of light I use it doesn't seem to make much difference. I even used special lighting preset, did not do a thing. The image is a glass door. My goal is to have the door look like a door in regular light. If I turn on either the dome or sun-sky setting, the windows look like windows should and the chrome is actually silver. Yes, those handles should be silver. What am I doing wrong that'scausing my lights to not work? I can put a point light, distant light, spot light, w/e, crank up the lumens to like a million and nothing.

SickleYield

There has to be something for the doors to reflect in order for them to look like chrome.  With the dome or sun-sky on, there's something there in the render.  If you don't want to use sun-sky or HDRI, put a single plane in the scene in front of the doors but behind the camera and texture it with a photograph that you want to be reflected.

defectedsaint

SickleYield said:

There has to be something for the doors to reflect in order for them to look like chrome.  With the dome or sun-sky on, there's something there in the render.  If you don't want to use sun-sky or HDRI, put a single plane in the scene in front of the doors but behind the camera and texture it with a photograph that you want to be reflected.

Well the doors are clear glass, I'm going to put the render over top of another render. It's only the handles that should be silver. I also don't want the glass to reflect as I want to be able to see what's on the other side/under this render. What about the light then? The scene itself is still too dark. Do lights in general need something specific to hit in order to work? You can't just shine a light ona prop and have the prop be lit up? You have to bounce the light off a wall or something in order for it t show?

thebiggydiggy

 

This is a metal shader applied with a gazillion lumen light at point blank. Bottom is nothing changed except an HDRI added. No reflect/refraction equals no light.

Do what SY said and place something where the rays will reflect to, meaning to your left and back. Alternatively drop the Metallicity slider to 0 and mess with the Gloss sliders until it resembles something reflective-y, though it'll be awful and nothing like any sort of metal.

defectedsaint

thebiggydiggy said:

 

This is a metal shader applied with a gazillion lumen light at point blank. Bottom is nothing changed except an HDRI added. No reflect/refraction equals no light.

Do what SY said and place something where the rays will reflect to, meaning to your left and back. Alternatively drop the Metallicity slider to 0 and mess with the Gloss sliders until it resembles something reflective-y, though it'll be awful and nothing like any sort of metal.

What SY said about the photograph threw me off. I put a plane behind the camera with the same kind of walls in the rest of the scene and it worked like a charm. Thank you both for the help. I'll make sure to keep this info in mind from now on.