For realism, I suggest adding a base on which to cast shadows and using the new indirect lighting feature to get the correct feel of realism. Apart from these items, you won't get what makes the Shinies smile. Decals are a huge dash of realism--use them whenever possible--with the other colors cleared out.
Regarding the materials, I have so far not created my own. Working with the existing materials can be a tad limited, but you can tweak them to add realism. One primary thing to do is to get the sheen of whatever you're working on correct. This is a matter of dialing in all the possible properties. So brushed aluminum needs to have a certain level of sheen (gloss, smooth, and reflection settings) to appear real. Get these set.
You'll also need the right scale. This can be tough. If you don't render at a very high resolution, you won't see differences in the mapping scale anyway--at least not with fine materials such as brushed aluminum. Do some smaller test renderings in your view port. Brian Hill advised me to do a few things to decrease the degree of madness that often occurs in this process.
1. Reduce your viewport to only about 1/4 of your screen to speed things up.
2. Use reduced shadow quality until you're ready for a good render.
3. Don't go crazy with the lights--two or three will usually be plenty. I often kill all except the indirect glow and a directional light unless I have dark spots in a scene. This adds great depth.
4. Start with the lowest setting of indirect lighting and work your way up after you get your other settings dialed in.
After things look good in the limited small view, then crank up your settings and render to file at something greater than 2,000 pixels. You should have the quality of JPEG turned up high and anti-aliasing up high if you want a good brushed aluminum finish to come through. Soften the shadows and use transparent shadows if your materials call for it. Turn up reflection and refraction numbers if needed.
I have a rendering that took 30 minutes to crunch, but it looks great. Translucent materials and shadows with decals and all the works. It looks great and I hope to get my butt in gear and get it posted on my site soon (half-done now, but not yet posted in HTML formats).
Obviously, you'll want a hot processor. RAM is good (but not that necessary), but you really won't need a high-priced graphics card for this part since you're rendering to file anyway. The processor is the bottle-neck. (I recommend AMD 64-bit, but I'm now quite biased.)
Your scene is very important. Make your background white. Use a spherical environment. Select a gray (about 70%-80% dark) and "constant" for your material settings for your two hemispheres in your scene. The constant material setting will make no good difference except with indirect lighting--which you will use anyway.
Use your own base--not a stock base--or the floor will end up at arbitrary heights in your scene (bug). Get the reflectance turned up and the color set to white. This will create shadows and an otherwise white surrounding area.
Enough rambling. Hope this helps.
Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC
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