I've been working with modeling for a while now and so I've got the hang of it, but recently started to discover the almost overwhelming importance of lighting. I've looked for tutorials, but there don't seem to be nearly as many as there should be, so hopefully someone here can help.
This is a Nissan 350z that I finished up a month or so ago:
Specifically in this case, what I want to know how to do is to create an environment map to reflect in this car's paint, and then how to light it so that I get the soft, realistic looking shadows that most professional work has. I'm happy with the modeling, but the reflections are just coming from white planes above the car and so they look boring. The shadow is just a directional light and looks really fake. I'd like to get the lighting/shadowing looking more like this:
Being the car that Robert Scott made for the tutorial that Simply Maya will be releasing (hope it's okay to use this image, it illustrates perfectly what I want to get).
Ideally I'd like to map an environment to a sphere surrounding the scene, so that everything reflects accurately (as opposed to applying an environment sphere shader or something to the material) but just don't know how to do it. As far as getting soft shadows I really am lost on lighting. Any help will be great!
- Jesse
