Glossy Reflection

[lefks]

Hey Guys,

 

I have been using glossy reflections on a ceramic sink that I have been working on. Render times are quite high but I have tweaked the scene to bring them down a little. My question is, is there any other way to get the sink look glossy without using glossy reflections? I could fake the reflection on the sink but it would not give me realistic results. I want to know of another technique maybe that I could apply to all glossy objects not necessarily only a sink!!

 

thanks

[manta]

Well you could go into "options" on that material and uncheck trace reflections, or you might try using an hdri in the reflection...

[lefks]

thanks Manta,

wouldn't unchecking trace reflections make my reflections disappear?

[Tim Saunders]

Yes and no. Unchecking trace reflections will cause only the light to be "reflected". It is the method I use a lot for far away small metal surfaces, like a window frame, or metal tubing. It just gives you a specular hilight, but ceramic needs an actual reflection, not just a hilight. There may be other ways to fake it by playing around with the falloff map. How blurry would the reflections really be in a ceramic sink? I wouldn't think you would go any lower than .85.

[lefks]

thanks for the info! I think my setting is at 1.0 for glossiness right now..I tried to reduce it even a little but I think because of the camera angle it won't even show any "gloss" if I lower it. I am assuming its my camera angle...

[Nic H]

you wont get any glossy effects on 1 unless you unlink the highlight glossiness and change it to something like .85 or .9

[lefks]

I actually have my highlight glossy set yo 0.1 and my refl. glossy to 1 (unlinked) and it gives me a nice glossy sink...I was just curious about an alternative!!

[Brian Smith]

Have you tried interpolation...it can really help with the rendering times but make sure that if you use the irradiance map, that you match the Min/Max rate in the reflection interpolation rollout with the Min/Max rate in the irradiance map rollout. The lower your Reflection Glossiness value, the more the interpolation can be of benefit

[Tommy L]

A solution that can be very effective, but is scene specific, is creating an environment map for the object using the panorama exporter. Its a cheat and not 100% accurate, but it fools the eye and renders in no time:

1 turn off your shiny object and place a camera there instead.

2 (utilities) panorama exporter.

3 use the paniramic in the environment slot of the shiny object

4 exclude shiny object from recieving reflections.

5 render.

 

With a few tries you may get some good results. Its quick to render because instead of calculating geometric reflections its just creating a reflection from a bitmap.

[lefks]

thanks Tommy,

I will try that as well!!!

[Tommy L]

I would be very interested to see your results

[steveblake]

..me too!

[BrianKitts]

if you are using light cache as your secondary bounce.... try clicking the checkbox for "use lightcache for glossy rays." It's a nice little gem that should help your render time.

[Sawyer]

Have you tried interpolation...it can really help with the rendering times but make sure that if you use the irradiance map, that you match the Min/Max rate in the reflection interpolation rollout with the Min/Max rate in the irradiance map rollout. The lower your Reflection Glossiness value, the more the interpolation can be of benefit

 

 

T'WA? Wow I had never heard that! the part about matching min/max rates.

-- quick hijack sorry--

 

So Brian I have a glossy scene and when I used interpolation the wall I had went really blurry and I had to up the subs to get the detail I needed. I ended up going to 70 subs and it was almost perfect (a little blurry) but the render times were through the roof. I was able to get better results using 30 subs and no interpolation. There is a little noise but I like that better than the loss of detail I saw with the interpolations.

 

Now I did not play with the min/max rates on the material reflection I left it at default. But will playing with that rate of the material in your opinion will that solve the problem of loss of detail in the glossy material?

 

 

Thanks

[Tyorl]

Just try to use LC for secondary bounces and check "Use LC for glossy" as BKittsARC adviced. Just be careful with sample count, size and Screen/World modes. LC for glossy is much faster then interpolation via Irmap, and the result are better.

[batteryoperatedlettuce]

I've been looking at ceramic stuff a lot lately. I was looking at the sink this morning actually and just thinking how not reflective it actually is. You can't really see your face in it. There are quite high specular highlights, but the reflection value is really quite low. I've re-rendered some of my previous bathrooms with much lower reflective settings and it seems to look quite good.