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...

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lefks

thanks Manta,
wouldn't unchecking trace reflections make my reflections disappear?

Timothy 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.

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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...

nicnic

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

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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.

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lefks

thanks Tommy,
I will try that as well!!!