Highly Reflective Surfaces

Started by scrappydog, December 12, 2012, 02:25:18 PM

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scrappydog

If you want to prevent highly reflective objects from mirroring each other in a rendering, how do you do that without loosing the shiny appearance of those object?  I have a model with several objects that have polished silver assigned to them.  The image gets very busy and confusing to look at because of the reflection of each object off of the other.  What can you to control this and still preserve the shiny surfaces ?

thanks,

TL

DriesV

#1
Lowering the amount of 'ray bounces' would be my first guess for a quick and dirty solution.
This value limits the number of times a ray is bounced between surfaces and thus limits the 'depth' of reflections/refractions.
Lowering this value CAN however introduce dark/black areas in certain areas that require lots of bounces to get enough light in to clear things up.

Another idea -and more true to actual physics- is to leave the amount of ray bounces high and introduce a VERY slight roughness to your shiny materials, f.i. 0.005. No surface in real life is perfectly (100%) reflective.
This low roughness will not be noticeable on 1st, 2nd or maybe even 3rd reflection bounces of object in close proximity, but they will increasingly blur out further bounces.

Also, in real life the number of ray bounces is infinite. The higher the amount of ray bounces, the more true to life your image will be.

Dries

PhilippeV8

You can render each object individualy ... no reflections then ... not sure if that'll end up looking real tho ..

DriesV

A litle illustration about what I said earlier.

Dries

DriesV

1st image: chrome roughness 0
2nd image: chrome roughness 0.003

greetings,
Dries