indoor, realistic reflective material help

[adbr]

I'm fairly new to indigo. Have been playing around a few months now but I'm impressed how easy it is to get decent results compared to other renderers.

Currently I have an indoor scene (bathroom), which is illuminated by spot lights.
The spot lights have an IES profile (tried several) and there are reflective materials like white plastic and polished marble.

The problem is, that when using a narrow IES profile instead of getting a realistic specular reflection, the whole surface of the object blows out. For example there is a spot light above the (white plastic) toilet, so naturally is will reflect a lot, but it doesn't look realistic, the whole surface is uniformly blown out.

I don't know if the problem lays with the material, the lights or the renderer or all of it...

I'm using bidirectional /w MLT and camera tone mapping but tried other combinations too.

I used materials from the database here.
https://www.indigorenderer.com/materials/materials/1575
https://www.indigorenderer.com/materials/materials/1403


I can't post a picture because of confidentiality, sorry. I'm just looking for general tips with this kind of setup, small room, reflective surfaces, spot lights.


tl;dr: How to get realistic white plastic/ shiny surface?

[Zom-B]

Hey adbr, welcome to the Indigo community.

A picture of your render output would help a lot to analyse your problem.

My aproach for such burned out images is to save the untonemaapped EXR out of indigo and do my tonemapping in PS or After Effects. There I have multiple PlugIns and settings to get it done.
If you upload such a untonemappped EXR of your file I could show an example how I would tonemap it

[adbr]

Thank you. As I said for confidentially reasons I can't post the whole image but I can give you the problematic part.
This is an extreme case where I purposely chose a very narrow beam. For some reason this also made the colors wonky.
The second example is a wider beam and has normal colors.

sample.zip

(908.85 KiB) Downloaded 126 times