Before you start a new max scene file, you have to recognize one thing. You made your own HDR-Image. And this image, we will ned twice in max. Why ? It´s simple, we will need one for our skylight (global illumination) and the other one for the reflection.

With Vray you have the opportunity to use both different channels seperat. For this reason, make a copy of your first hdri, and name both with the following:

a) HDRI-Reflection
b) HDRI - Skylight

Now it´s clear that it´s the same hdri, but with an existing copy of it.

Start now your new max scene file.

a) Matching the HDRI-Reflection

Very important. At frist we match the reflection. For that, open your Material Editor (Shortcut M) and load your HDR Image as Bitmap. You also could load it into a Vray-HDRI, but with the Bitmap you have the Output channel included, that we will need a little bit later.

Get sure, that your Bitmap is loaded as spherical environment.

Also check that you have choosen Vray as your render. Before you can make your first test render, we have to make some settings with vray. I don´t make a special explaination for vray, therefore you can use your manual or the offical website of chaosgroup. I will show you in a practical way, how you can get photorealistic result.

Deactivate the default lights, and also the hidden lights.



Here an example for a fast setting.

In the environment slot you need to load your hdri reflection only. That´s it. Now it´s time to use your probes in max and create a material, that gives us the same reflective sphere on the image after rendering.

For this, we load our silver reflective sphere, that we have photographed with our bg image into our viewport. Open the Material Editor and load the probe as Bitmap. Get sure, that you load it as Environment and for the mapping type choose Screen.

Now load the first probe into our Enironment Slot (shortcut 8).

To see this image in your viewport, you have to make the following settings.

Now we need a reflective material, that will match our chrome sphere after rendering. I used the following settings.

Because you have 100% reflection, you have a mirror effect, and you can see the environment from our hdr image. And this reflection we have put into the Reflection channel in the GI Environment. And this reflection again we want to match with the real life reflection we photographed.

To render the reflection perfect from the viewport, you have to position the 3d sphere on the right place. Create a sphere, and rotate your camera (not the sphere) to get the same angle of the image you can see in the viewport. Just try it free. If everyting is set right, the image looks like below.

Add the reflective material to your sphere and click render. Now, you should get the
following result.

As you can see, the reflection from our 3d sphere, doesn´t match with the reflection of our bg image. That´s the reason, why we made the probe. Now we want to make some adjustments to match this reflection with the sphere on the bg image.

And now the Output options of our HDR-Bitmap are used to match.



With the three options ammount, rgb offset and rgb level you control the brightness, shadow and color contrast. To get the right reflection, you have to make some changes. If you set the values to the image above, you will get a very nice result. After changing these settings, I´ve made a new render. And now, the 3d sphere looks like the real sphere. You also can edit the values of the color contrast. Click on "Enable Color Map" and try your best. In our example it wasn´t necessary, and we could match it without that edits.

If you would not have the right white balance, and you would have as instance a red touch in your image, than these features are really great to make the changes and try to match as best as you can. Don´t worry if you will not get the best result after seconds, you have to get the right feeling with this feature.

Great, now you have sucessfully matched the reflection.