First of welcome to the site, secondly you will need to use either mental ray or vray to render this. I would recommend vray. All you need to do it stick the image in an environment map and then make a reflective shader, There are tons of vray tutorials out there.

There are plenty of people here who will gladly walk you through the process. So I recommend that you download a trail of vray and start reading up.

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I'm not totally sure what you are asking but I made this brief video describing how to create raytraced reflections using the scanline render in 3ds max. It could also be helpfull for some basic material editor tips too.

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DUDE! awesome video man! We are going to make a deal with you man

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man i'm more and more impressed with your videos!

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Cogito, Ergo Sum

For sure dude I'm trying to make a bunch of bite sized videos to handle some of the common queries people have. I need to get into the hang of making these videos without getting all tongue tied. So stay tuned for more very soon

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First of all, I'm amazed at how friendly and helpful you guys are. Usually I don't sign up on a forum just to post a question since, well I just don't think it's right.

Jamie, thankyou for the suggestion, I've heard of the Vray editor before and I had this suspicion that I might need it to do what I need. I'm downloading the demo at the moment but my internet usually likes to crash a lot around this time of night and it's taking a little over an over to download the 8 meg file.

Tyson, your video was very unexpected, but it really helped me out a lot. The part where you added an environment map is exactly what I needed to know. However you mentioned the only way to render it without the ugly environment map in the background is to use a renderer such as Vray, since I'll be needing to render it with a transparent background. Your video was incredibly informative though and I thank you a lot for posting it.

Thanks once again guys, I'll let you all know how I go

Ben.

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[Link to mediadesign.deviantart.com]
[Link to www.youtube.com]

Yea we could easily win the most helpful forum award, well I hope you stick around ben

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If you're using mental ray and the raytrace material there's an environment map slot which you can stick your environment map in. In fact any material (I think) in max has the mental ray connection rollout that has an environment map slot so you can stick you environment map in there.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Thats a good work around. but it does mean the environment map is only working local with that material. you would need to add the connection to all the reflective materials in the scene. And you need to have mental ray as the active renderer. If you save the images with an alpha channel they will still have transparency but there will be a thin edge of colour around the objects where the alpha channel has grey pixels (from anti-aliasing) the alpha channel is being multiplied ontop of the RGB channels so wherever it is 100% black (0.0) the colour will be gone, grey (0.5) will let the colour through a bit. so you could still use a render with the environment in the rgb channels depending on what colours you have in the background you are compositing against.

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All this talk about mental rays has me a little lost - although no need to explain since I've found my solution with Vray! (however mental rays sound important... should look into that soon). I managed to set up an environment map with a HDRI and still render a reflective object on a transparent background! Not to mention the quality is just incredible. Fortunately what I'm doing is pretty damn simple in terms of amount and detail of objects, so I don't think I'll have any more issues (anyway, it doesn't have to be perfect, however the results I'm getting pretty much are).

I'll definitely stick around (site already bookmarked) and post as much as I can. Thankyou guys once again, your help is very much appreciated. This is more than I could've asked for.

Ben.

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[Link to mediadesign.deviantart.com]
[Link to www.youtube.com]

Glad to have helped. It's definately worth looking into mental ray. Personally, Vray is my favourite renderer but that's probably just because I know it better and I can achieve good results pretty quickly and easily. You'll find mental ray is probably better in some areas while vray is better in others, but in the end it's really down to the user rather than the renderer as to what sort of results are achieved.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Awesome. Join the ranks of the vray converted . Its a very very good renderer. By all means learn mental ray too but essentially they do the same stuff. mental ray has some great features but In my opinion vray is the king of the hill. I use both all the time these days so I'm not dissing on mental ray there are just so many invaluable features in vray that make it very usefull. This environment override is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Yeah I've realised Vray is much more powerful that enviroment maps I've been reading up on it and what it has to offer is just incredible. The realism is produces is scary.

Is there a way to use a standard JPG instead of a HDR image as an environment map? I don't have a camera that can take HDR images so I'm needing to settle with JPG's.

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Yeah man instead of selecting VrayHDR map just choose Bitmap and load your jpeg file like any other material. Then drag and drop an instance into the material editor to mess with it.

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--Matt

Actually I tried that already, but instead of it spherically covering the environment it just seems to tile itself and the reflection is.. well it looks like this:
[Link to img37.imageshack.us]
when it should look like this
[Link to img37.imageshack.us]

probably because when I use a VrayHDR I can choose its map type, whereas a simple Bitmap I cannot.

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[Link to mediadesign.deviantart.com]
[Link to www.youtube.com]

Check the video again. the same thing applies for the vray environment. just load in the bitmap then drag it to the material editor as an instance. then you change the type of mapping in the bitmap parameters to spherical.

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Ah thanks mate, can't believe I didn't think of referencing the video! Works great

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We all have our moments

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