How do you achieve this effect?
 

Im curious as to how you achieve this realistic looking relfection, all i can get is a hot white spot?

http://www.hinst.net/~phalcon/how.jpg

Thanks for your help

if you mean the reflection with all the white spots... then you can try HDRI

-Emo

im not really sure how HDRI works, i have GI Joe, and i tried putting a picture of a sky as the "sky color" but i didnt see any effect.

am i doing something wrong?

You might be.

In the main GIJoe pop-up control window, under HDRI Fake, there is a checkbox. That needs to be on in order for your color image to be evaluated/calculated/faked as a HDRI image to achive those cool highlights and reflections that you need:)

Here is an image for you to see what I mean:

Arrow 1 when this box is checked, you can put your mouse over almost any piece of text in the GIJoe panel, and get help on what it is/does.
Arrow 2 You said you added a color image in this color slot, so I won't talk about that:)
Arrow 3 when you add a color image to the color slot (see Arrow 2 ), in order for the HDRI effects to happen, this checkbox needs to be checked.

http://www.ragecgi.com/public/SM/LIV.../GIJoetip1.gif

Hope this has helped a little:)

I did have that checked, and it didnt seem to make any difference. What kind of image should i be using for the HDRI image?

Does anyone have a sample of how this should turn out so i can see?

Thanks for your help so far

Sure, sheck out http://www.pixho.com for a complete tutorial, and many sample images:)

I havent messed a lot with HDRI but when I tried it for the first time, I used pictures with an extention .hdr

and actually I haven't even tried HDRI with Gi_Joe so...

-Emo

Oh, btw, use HDRShop to convert your .hdr images to Floating Point tiffs for use with Maya. (GIJoe specificly)

I believe that targas work too, but I just stick with what Pixho said, and use FP Tiffs :)

Actually now that I think about it... I got the .hdr files and I had to convert them... but I used .jpg and it still worked :)

-Emo

Ok i downloaded HDRshop and converted a .hdr file to a FP tiff but when i try to set that image as the sky texture in Gi_joe i get an error from Maya that says Failed to open Texture file...

Any ideas what im doing wrong now?

Thanks
Adam

did you try converting it to a regular jpg file? It worked for me

-Emo

Weird!

...yeah, if it worked for EMO, then try jpeg.

It's finiky sometimes:)

yeah, i use tga, i can't get fp tiff's to work either... Guys!! Maya 5 just came in at work!! I have it sitting on my desk! I can't wait to try it :)
Brian

Cool man!