Look Dev Part 1 - Lighting test

Here's my VFX production workflow. There's a lot of different ways, but I think I will somehow follow this approach.

So I decided to do a test for the lights and rendering, since my story consist of a car, and obviously there's a lot of reflections. I went to Upper Pierce Reservoir to do the test for a very simple reason, that there aren't many people there. I don't want to have 'ghost' image of people walking around in my reflection. And here's the LatLong map.

It's a HDR image so I tonemapped for posting here in the blog. Good thing is the overcast sky so I don't have to cast hard shadow. To get a complete reflection in all direction, I need to get 360 degree map.

And here' the background plate.

The scene is lit entirely by the hdr image. I also turn off the default light. Fresnel was used to get the facing angle reflections. So here's the final render with the CG car.

A close inspection on the reflection at the rear of the car where it is facing the reservoir shows good reflectivity compared to the side door, which is correct.

Although the shadow a bit black, but I think that can be fixed in comp as this exercise is to test the IBL for the effects.