This is not a Tutorial on how to add reflections to a chop, this is a how-to on how to 'see' reflections and incorperate that into your own chop...
Take a look at this shiny purple 4 door, nice huh.....what do you see in terms of reflections? Look at things closely, then scroll down..
Ok, now I'm gonna show you what I see.
The red higlighted areas. See those trees in the background? That's what I'm showing you in these areas. Notice how the trees don't look exactly the same as they do in the background compared to the reflected trees. They are squished(for lack of a better term), in the reflection they got smaller and bunched together more....also notice that the sky(clouds) is also right on top of the trees, towards the camera.
The green highlighted areas. Look at the reflection on the bottom of the doors, the ground is really detailed and you can almost make out every stone and oil stain on the ground right next to the car. Now look how the reflection of the ground fade back 'into' the car, the details get less and less. Then look where the pavement 'ends' there's cars and more trees, and maybe even the bottom of a golf cart right in the center of the front door.....but also notice how the closer the reflection gets to the trim piece running down the car the more the cars/trees/sky gets 'flattened'.
The blue highlighted areas. Look especially at the side of the hood, the cars are getting really 'flattened', why? Because the reflection is still following the cars that are behind and to the right of the camera but they are quickly fading into whatever is in front of the car reflecting off the front of the hood. You can almost make out the drivers side fender in the side of the hood towards the front if you look closely. Also, look at the rear fender, you can almost see a whole picture in there, there's a few cars, parking spots, trees, sun, clounds, sky and so on. But look what's happening when you look around to the front of the rear fender, things are getting 'warped', why? Because the fender isn't a mirror, it's a curved piece of metal painted and polished up to look like a mirror.....the curve make everything look distorted towards the front of the fender. But look at the part near the wheel well, pavement, it's the closest thing to the car so naturally it's the first thing from the groud up to reflect into the paint.
This was a quicky thrown together just to help a few people out, you'll notice alot more things in terms of how reflections 'flow' if you really start to look at real world reflections and take note of what exactly is going on and why....I can't tell you how many times I've sat around just looking into paint jobs trying to figure out why something is reflecting the way it is....but it is interesting to say the least...BTW, if there's not that many shiny cars sitting around your place, go on the web, seriouswheels.com has tons of these types of pictures with tons of these types of reflections to gaze into.....keep looking out for those reflections and sooner or later you'll get it..
Hope this helps some people 'see' reflections. And mostly, I hope it helps people create reflections better in their chops. If you find one reflection in the picture above that you could call 'mirrored' then I might give you a dollar.....so if your creating reflections on a chop and you think that they should be a cut and paste of a picture and that's it, well, I guess you haven't 'seen the light' yet....that is unless your chop is of flat paneled car...