environment

[dibbers]

How do I determine whether my glass reflections reflect the environment colour/map or not? There only seems to be an exit colour to choose.

[Morbid Angel]

by default your max environment is reflected. Exit color is something else, that is the brightness of the reflection if im not mistaken, where black = true reflected color, and white lifted not true reflected color.
If you want to override reflection you can use vray environment override reflection/refraction.

[dibbers]

No, you're wrong about the exit colour, but anyway, what I mean is, that I'm trying to re-create the option you have with a Std Raytrace material, where you have the oprion to include the environment or a colour (default black) in your reflections.

[jonnybefree]

environment slot in vray-materials.

[dibbers]

But if I leave that alone, my glass still reflects the environment colour. I also have Vray overiding Max's environment, but that's just for GI, isn't it?

[Morbid Angel]

no you are wrong, vray environment overrides gi for gi, and reflection for reflection they are separated

[Da_elf]

in the render settings vray will override max's environment color/map for lighting and reflection seperately. this will be a global override. in the material editor vrays environment slot will override vrays render setting override for reflection and refraction only...not the GI as well.

[dibbers]

OK, so if I want a particular material's reflection environment to be black whilst still using a different colour/material for the environment (whether it's Max's or Vray's), I need to use the environment slot in that particular material...by choosing a black bitmap or something.

Is this correct?

[joconnell]

Yup absolutely correct - just curious why you'd want to do this? By default the way the raytracer in vray (and most others) works is that object will try and reflect scene objects first of all and if it can't see any of those it'll reflect the environment.

Can you explain what you are trying to achieve with it?

[dibbers]

Great. Got there in the end!

I do want it to reflect an environment after it reflects objects first, but, in the case of architecture, I don't always want it to reflect the sky colour.

Anyway, this has done the trick.

Thanks all for your invaluable help.

[DaForce]

Exit color is just whats show after the reflection/refraction bounces reach the specified amount... in real life there is infinite bounces but they need to be restricted in 3d to get decent render times.
You want to upp the bounces until there is no black shown to get a properly reflection/refraction.

Basically a simple glass cube should be fine with around 5 or so.. but if you go into detailed glass or layered glass you need to up the levels to get rid of the black so that the reflection looks proper.
If anything the exit color is a warning system not something you "should" see.