More chrome than pimp my ride,

 ive found HDRI to be slow, limiting and a general pain. so ive decided to hook up the following solution, which looks a mess...

 what i have, is the scene exported from boujou, with a shadow plane directly under it.
level with the shadow plane i have another plane, which has a pattern on it that matches the tablecloth.

I then set up some other planes that had pictures of the corresponding sections of the kitchen on them, these were then moved and rotated into place.
these planes all had their primary visibility turned off, and only displayed in reflections.

side note, alot of the time the planes had to be placed in a place that didnt correspond with their real life place to get the correct reflection effect.

The obvious problem with making a chrome toaster is having the reflections on it. as just using chrome itself ended up with this result.

That is still a reflection rather than being transparent, but it in no way looks sufficient.
I then thought to try something completely different, and went for a may software approach to create a brushed metal, that didnt have visible reflections in it.

this is done with a blinn going through an env ball, with a noise attached to it.  but again, did not surfice.

So i went back to the drawingboard, and played about a bit more, to find a balance between reflection and distortion. and ended up with a material based off chrome, but heavily edited in the attribute editor. The result was, in my opinion, very good

(All similarities to Apple adverts are entirely coincidental)


Obvious problem with the result...im not there! but i think trying to put myself in it would be near impossible so i'll try and hide the fact.