Hmm, I remember seeing someone post a topic about the exact same thing just a couple of days ago. Can't remember what was causing it, but try the search to find it.
I've been working on improving some of my scenes, first up was the BF1 since I had to rebuild it anyway because the original got corrupted for some reason.
I'm not too sure about it though, been trying to do something different from my previous one. The wheel material definitely sucks. And those sidewall alpha's keep annoying me
looks okay, it really need a GI (skylight) in there though for the shadows to really fit in rather than just being ... how it is now, as for your tires, the problem is is that you're using a bump map, and its only giving the effect of being 3d, which ... you dont want the effect, you want it to really be like that, so thats the only problem
but a skylight will really improve the whole look, and give the wheels and body some shadow to it rather than just being a light, and a ground shadow like it is now
Actually there is a skylight in there, but I agree on the shadows. I just wanted to experiment with lighting more. Before I just used the simple self-illuminating reflection plane above the car. So I'm still learning how to get it right.
About the wheels, the material is pretty much unchanged from my previous renders and it just doesn't seem to come together at all with this lighting setup. Although it always seemed to look better on wheels with few, larger spokes. So I'm going to have to tweak that around as well.
Yeah, the tyres...I would have to model my own to make them look better. For now, they look much better than they used to, I spent a lot of tweaking on the material to make the best out of it.
And it's not just one light in the scene, there are about 5
Anyway, its work in progress
i wonder if anyone has ever corrected any models to smooth them for render purposes. Maybe we should each do one model for rendering and make it public. I think ill start on xrt...
it depends man.
Most of the time its a picture in 3D on a plane(background). So it seems like its really there. Or it could be a 360 hdri image.
Or indeed it could be justa model on black background and edited in photoshop...
You could use Brazil Chrome (load Raytrace_01.mat into library) but that would take a very long time to render (and be very bright. I would suggest that you use maybe one of Ian H.'s Brazil materials, because they provide a good ground texture. (http://dsrc.digiserv.net/forum/showthread.php?t=830)