OnoSendai wrote:mmmn sexy...
and very nice integration with the HDR (how did u do it?)
I Hope you don't misunderstood my posting
this work is Cinema 4D
ONLY at the moment...
doing a Indigo version without up to date Exporter is some pain in the ass,
so I'll render in Indigo when model is finalized!
poorly in Indigo HDR lightning is something you only can aktivate or deaktivate,
without any control of size & turning
Aligning the Car to the HDR Image is very easy in each 3D Application,
just turn the HDR Dome the way you like and size it so the Car looks
neither too big or small for the Scene!
So why don't make HDR lightning to an Material so it would be easy to integrate into each Exporter,
and the user would gain 100% control of his HDR Dome...
the technique I used to compose the Car into this picture is very easy:
1)
at first doing a Rendering
without any Ground, the car floating inside the HDR Dome.
By leaving the Ground Plane away you make sure that the Car gets reflections & illumination
by the Ground color of the HDRI too!
2)
To get the shadows I used a hemisphere Light, as big as the Skydome,
and used area shadows
Now simply create a ground plane that will receive shadows, render a simple multipass, one for Ambient Oclusion, and on for Shadows
Ambient Occlusion:
Shadows:
3)
I cut the shadows out of the car, because otherwise it would be way to dark,
the "shadows" by the Ambient Oclusion Pass are enough to give some good "3D feeling" to it!
But if you use a brighter Car Paint keep it, it should bring more visual depth into the model!
Finally combinate all Images in Photoshop Layers, using multiply for the shadow & AO pass, you may try to take two layers of the shadow to make it stronger... to get a sharper shadow, you should play with the sitze of the hemisphere that doing the shadow work (smaller = sharper).
Its also very Important to sharpen the background HDRI,
because it always gets blurred while using on a HDR Dome for lightning.
because your rendered Model is normally 101% sharp like a Hattori Hanzo blade,
the background shoud be too, so everything fits together
BTW:
I'm planning to make a Postwork Tutorial after finishing my exams in march
**EDIT**
I used the word HDR Dome so often, for everybody who don't know,
its simply a big sphere textured with a HDRI that is doing the lightning.
The smaller such a Dome is, the better the Lightning from the different HDRI could be seen,
if you use a gigantic Dome, the light gets someway mixed up to a cut through color.
)
Downright fresh design. What for a beauty, i hope one soon sees more. Him start has succeeded you. 
it seems that some surfaces are not really smooth.
