How do you achieve chrome, ie. full reflection of environment? I tried so many different ways and no luck. I made the alpha white in areas I wanted to have 100% reflection and my base color for those areas is black. It works to the extent that the car becomes reflective but you can still see base color. It's as if environment reflections are in a blending mode or half opaque on car. I save my textures in DXT5 .dds format from photoshop.
Ah, that's a shame. I'm using 3d sim ed to preview my textures and it does not do environment reflections and when I changed the fresnel values there was no change. Plus I'd have to reapply the material to all of the car parts and make a new car to have a chrome livery for a car that is same chassis otherwise. Guess I'll opt out of chrome for now but thanks for pointing out the reason!
Chrome is not black, why would your base in those areas be black? Try a very neutral 50% grey base color and see what happens.
@moseisly check this threads out. They might help you http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/7691-Normals-which-way http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/5712-Car-material-changes
Traditionally it is black for pure chrome, and darker shade of yellow/orange for gold. I'm not new to 3d/CGI and I've used 3ds max for years for vfx and architectural rendering. Thanks, those 2 threads seem helpful. Seems like I'll have to duplicate my car to have a chrome version of it with a new material (altered fresnel values). I know in 3ds max vray renderer materials use actual fresnel IOR values, for chrome it's 10-12 but I'll follow what they suggest in those threads since ISI uses min/max and exponential for falloff. Thanks again!
