There is a toy plane and we are going to create a material for it and we also need to prepare our scene for rendering and set lights. In fact this little toy plane was modeled by my Chinese friend Han Cun Zhi.
A) Preparing Scene and Lights
1- The background is not very important here but as a common way you can create a plane as your ground. I create a very big one and applied a wood material on it.
2- For lighting the scene, I have used Photometric lights. My reason is that Photometric light can give me accurate result and also I have more control over my light and its temperature. In this picture you can see that I used two Photometric Free Lights and also you can see setting of each one.
Just a short explanation over my lights settings:
-- I used “rectangle” as emit light shape and changed its length and width. Be careful to not
change the size of rectangle shape by “Scale” tool.
-- From the “light distribution” list I picked “Uniform diffuse”. In this mode, light rays just
distributed in a hemisphere. We do not need to light back of the light source. So “uniform diffuse”
mode will help to focus light rays in front of light source.
-- “Ray Traced Shadows” support Mental Ray and transparency so I used it. Maybe you ask why I did not try “Mental Ray Shadows map” which can be work with mental ray quicker. My answer is because raytraced shadows is slower but more accurate.
-- For color of your lights you can select one of the lamp presets from light drop down list or set Kelvin temperature.
3- As far as our materials have high reflection, it is better to use an HDR image as environment. Click on the Environment in the Rendering menu. Environment dialog will appear. Click on the “Environment Map” slot which labeled “None”. Material/map browser will open. Here double click on the “Bitmap”. Now from browsing dialog, choose an HDRI file. I use one which provide by 3ds max software.
