Reflection appearing faceted problem.

[re:FORM]

This isn't specific to vray as the same problem occurs using scanline rendering, but I was hoping someone had a solution.

I have a lathed curved surface that appears to be adding facets to the reflection. This occurs with both a raytrace material with scanline, and using a vray material. I've tried using 'smooth' aswell as upping the polycount smoothing with turbosmooth, but the facets refuse to go. I dont understand what could be causing this problem!

The reflection on the top of the badge is of a vray light, you can see that the reflection doesn't curves smoothly along the curve of the surface, but appears faceted.

[Morbid Angel]

without posting a scene it will be hard to determine. You said you tried to smooth it, or turbosmooth it, I didnt understand, it didnt smooth at all or it didnt help the effect?
It may be that your model is broken by face, so when you smooth it, it has no effect.
Try to export it to obj then back, try to weld all verticies with radius of 0.001... check to see if all normals are facing the right way. See if that helps.

[re:FORM]

The scene is as simple as they come.

One spline with lathe modifier. Weld core ticked. The mesh is clean. Increasing the subdivisions in the lathe doesnt effect the reflection.

I'm sure its something really stupid that I'm doing wrong, as I can't believe its a problem with either the mesh or the material. I even tried using a circle as the reflection object to make sure it wasn't the fact that the reflection object was a rectangle causing the problem!

Here's the scene. (max9)

http://www.reformstudios.com/03-resources/badge_02.max

[DaForce]

Its a mesh problem.

You only have about 3 cap segments around the top of the badge. And thats why your reflections are edgy because the mesh is

Drop back down to the line, turn off adaptive and crank up the line steps to about 35. then go back to the top of the stack so it re-lathes it. and it will render fine now
You will need to remove the edit poly before you drop down to the line.

See the problem is you have heaps of edges running out from the middle.. and upping the lathe segments would increase that. but the main problem is there isnt enough cap edges (rings) around the badge. Thats quite clear in the wireframe.

I lowered the lathe segments down to make it easier to see the issue.

Bad Reflection


Good Reflection

[re:FORM]

Oh dear.... I knew I was being stupid somewhere!

I never realised that smoothing groups didnt smooth reflections.....
Well you learn something new every day eh!

Thanks guys.

[DaForce]

heheh no problem mate