Oh I spent days on this. It is very hard to make this work, I made the environment map for TWD in photoshop. There is always the tradeoff between bright reflections and the effect that has on other objects or artefacts. One trick is to blur the environment file, this reduces artefacts but also the dramatic effect of the environment file. I once asked the dev’s for being able to use a different environment file for a primitive, instead of just one for everything. The only true workaround I have is create a texture with highlights in Blender and put the primitive with the texture on “disable lighting”, but that disables the nice lighting effects in VPX.
For my Diner WIP I will once again try again to get the following:
- nice highlights for wireramps and transparent ramps
- good contrast on the rest without artefacts
- no artefacts on the wireramps and the transparent ramps
- no reflections on other objects which look out of place (like the apron)
The general guidelines could be these:
- use a good free HDR from the internet as a base (like “overheadvpx”)
- The upper 20% of the image should be (almost) black usually, otherwise you will have to much shine on ramps and objects
- the lowest 25-50% can be dark/black since they show only on the bottom side of objects, except when you want this (see Knorr’s latest demolition man env. map if I recall)
- highlights for (wire/transparent) ramps usually are placed in the upper 25% area, I copy hightlights from other HDR files and paste them on top of the general HDR map)
And even with this: try to make one, run VPX, see if you like it, adapt/tweak and repeat ad infinitum. And don’t be surprised if it totally fails you when you made a nice one for FS and try it in DT, angle is different.
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