So would you suggest I duplicate this surface (push it out a bit too) and make it a see through yet highly reflective surface? I'll give that a go, I'll post the results when I do.
Your specular is extremely broad, check your references again, especially near the edges where the surface turns, the specular is very sharp, almost wet looking (marked in green below). Also look where the two pieces collide (shown in red)
That isn't the carbon fibre that's giving the glossy look though. We use carbon fibre for building the parts of our animatronics that are going to take a lot of punishment and the surface is shiny, but not particularly glossy. It's also not perfectly smooth. I'd think a subtle normal map might go some way to getting you…
Wow that's so awesome! thank you for going through that! And yes! you are certainly right, the Carbon fiber on my mesh is completely mirrored along the middle. This is because I only unwrapped one half of the surface and then mirrored it. After this is all sorted, I was planning on collapsing them and separating them so…
So I've taken some of the suggestions from here and this is what I've come to, I'm still not at the part where I will be using the xiluil shader, Most probably because the rendering won't be done with that (most likely mental ray or vray) However important thing for me right now is to see how I can get the right maps for…