god this is wierd

[sv]

right, i know i should post an image to best describe this but i'm not to sure how to do it....

This is the problem:
Woodern floor with glossy reflections. Nothing fancy in the material, just a standard vray material, reflections on about 75 - glossyness on 7.5, subdivs on a high 40.
Very simple scene, office floor with windows on both sides, a map of a city in the environment channel. I want the floor to be glossy reflecting things like the desks and the people in the room, but this is so wierd; it seems to be rendering the environment map on its surface - not reflected, but the stuff that is below the floor. There is no refraction at all on the floor material. It is a 25mm thick surface, but i can see as reflections the part of the image that the floor should be hiding!

Anyone got any clues?

[percydaman]

is the city map your referring to, set to be spherical environment?

[sv]

No, Its just set as environment : screen

[percydaman]

and thats your problem...set it to spherical

[sv]

ok, can you explain why this is? I didn't want to distort the map like the spherical environment does, but by tiling it x2 it kind of looks acceptable. But it has worked most importantly so thank you very much.

Why was i getting a "reflection" or whatever it was appearing through a surface - there was no transparency, no refraction, nothing on the material.

I have lost a lot of detail and also colour detail aswell now that it is a spherical map... any solutions or explanations?

[sv]

One thing that i should say actually is i can't believe the improvement that has had on the quality of image. The lighting is just so much more beautiful, and looks so much more evenly dispersed. I had no idea it would make any difference at all, because in Vray::environment i have HDR lighting, and override max environment turned on.

Things like before, my ceiling was way to dark compared with the rest of the walls, i was even considering shining a vray light onto it only, even though this would be physically incorrect; now it just looks spot on. No adjustment needed at all.

I didn't think the max environment would affect the lighting in anyway, but it looks great - cheers. Just need to tweek the tiling on the map to get the view right.

[Da_elf]

this has long been a problem with any raytracer when you set anything to screen. basically i place my image onto a quad patch grid with self illumination and set it not to affect GI nor to generate or recieve any

[sv]

and presumably just match by eye your quad patch so it looks like it fills the background?

[Da_elf]

more or less yeah. problem with a sperical environment on your image is that usually images are not setup for 360 degree spherical environments. in photoshop you can expand your image slightly to give you more sky and sides so that even though you dont see the sky on your render through the window. maybe some reflections near the window would pick up on it.