Yes I am aware I already posted this render here, however @nurgenius wanted to see what the lighting setup/scene looks in general… and to be fair I believe this is something worth sharing with the developer community.
Here we go…
Alright for starters, you should know what the principle shader is for Blender and how PBR materials interact, if you don’t then you should google around, as that is primary what gives that car its look. I’ll give you a major hint to the key of achieving this render’s look. The car’s body is pure metal, everything else is pure dialectic. With that being said, you should also know a bit about Blender’s Color Management to help speed things up, if you don’t then you should see this video by Andrew Price which gives you a quick run down of it. Now that’s out of the way, I used this setup for the Color Management:
And this is my World settings:
And this is my vehicle with just these settings for lighting:
…Doesn’t look very real does it? Well there’s a problem here, the model getting lit from all angles, and in the real world you don’t have light emitting from the ground. How do you fix this? Simple! You add a ground surface. However you will also want to give the ground some color, as if its white then all of the light will bounce off the ground and give the underside of the model an unnaturally lit feeling, like it currently looks… only amplified (and depending on how reflective your material is, it can be pretty severe)
However because I really only want the world lighting to shine down on my model and not on its sides, my “ground” is more like a bowl:
You may notice that the sky is black in this picture, its actually off-white but I have Blender told to render the background as transparent, but it’ll render it as black in the viewport. However you may not believe me because the underside of the car is pretty dark. That’s because I have my ground surface color to be dark grey.
Now its time to move onto Lighting…
In my scene I have 5 objects emitting the light. 3 over head lights (#1) and 1 extra light (#2) that I needed in order to make the car’s side just a tad bit more visible, and lastly a small plane inside of the car’s cabin to illuminate the interior (not visible). For the interior side light I used a very low emission value of a light source that was mostly white but had a dash of yellow, but for the overhead lighting I used something a tad bit more complex but also incredibly simple at the same time:
##However that is not all…
We’re so close! look at this car! Its done!
Or so you may think… but its not really done yet. Somethings still missing… But what might it be? What’s missing is the glimmer of the headlights and a faint but subtle glimmer where the colored light shines off the cars body.
You might think that to get that look you need to jack up the brightness of your lights, or mess with your materials, however neither of those two will get you that finished look. Instead you need to head over to the Compositor tab and do some post composition to you render. What all specifically? Just a simple vignette effects around the corners of the image and adding glares. To do this, simply just copy my node setup.
And then you end up with something like this:
And that’s about it. If anything needs clarification let me know.
