Bonjour Polyman13b,
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The amber colored lights are not giving me that vibrant colored glass look neither is the red tailights
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A good way to force the color on reflective and transparent is to work in HLS mode. Put your saturation beyond 1, and you'll see that while keeping the same level of transparency and reflectivity the color will be stronger.
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plus the chrome insides of the light housings always look dark, and never give the look as if it is supposed to be reflecting the enviroment surrounding it.
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It's possible that there is nothing to reflect, so your reflecting surfaces reflect black. If you want to create a "studio" look, like in ads, you have to create some sort of environment. You can simulate lightboxes by creating grids with white constant shader, and placing them at the right place. Turn off the primary rays and shadows, so it will show up only in reflections.
An effective recipe for chrome objects is to put between 0.80 and 0.95 for the reflection colors, and a diffuse colors that are around 0.15. Also, the specular color should be beyond 1 (you can even go up to 15) and the Specular Decay between 500 and 700.
For the glass, you could set the transparency to 0.90 and the refraction index to 1.3 as a starting point. You should include a pattern texture (could be a checkerboard) with UV projection to drive the refraction (put less than 1 in the first color and more than 1 in the second). The specular is the same as for the chrome, but you will put 700 or more (up to 2000) in the Specular Decay.
If you need tutorials about material and textures go to these links:
http://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutoria...erials\_xsi.html
http://www.softimage.com/Education/XSI/Sel...als/default.htm
http://www.xsifiles.com/
Hope this helps
Salutations - Cheers
Bernard Lebel