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These cylindrical tank objects were created by applying gradients to shaped selections using KPT Gradient Designer. The exception to this is the blue tank, which was a test rendering done in Asymmetrix 3Df/x to find out what highlights should do (converge to center or spread out) at the rounded ends of a cylindrical tank. Looking at the blue rendered tank (no actual tanks were in the room) provided a reference used when generating the gray pseudo-3D tanks.
The gray tanks were done by applying a gradient to a rectangular region with KPT Gradient Designer, then using KPT Glass Lens on an elliptical selection area (copied from the rectangle after the gradient, with KPT Glass Lens applied more than once, with a different Glue setting the second time to get the highlight to spread). The ellipse was then moved so that half was at each end of the rectangle, forming a completed tank. Variations followed, including a vertical tank, an outdoor tank with highlights blurred to resemble outdoor light on a giant side-of-the-road storage tank, and a tank with a conical taper and hopper at the bottom. These tanks were created in grayscale so that they could be tinted to be any desired color in the future.