Basic studio floor material tips

[simmsimaging]

Hi all - happy holidays.

I'm trying to work out a basic material I can use for studio coves/walls/floors etc. A nice basic semi-gloss white material, but one I can adjust the glossiness on is good. I've made it a number of different ways, and I like the Vray material route, but I'm finding it can be just too slow and/or noisy when I get into a semi-gloss range (like glossines between .5-.75)

I can kill the reflections and just use highlights to make it faster, but then it gives unrealistic looking results. Interpolation is causing me some issues as well.

Anyone have any tips on how to better build or optimize a material like that to speed up rendering?

Thanks
b

[flipside]

You can use a mask in the reflection slot to limit the reflections. For example a radial gradient as your mask so the reflections fade out. This way you limit the area that needs to be calculated, plus you can get away without blurry reflections if you just want to dim them out over a distance.

[simmsimaging]

That is a great idea - thanks!

b

[Subburb]

Hey, nice tip here !

[andrewjohn81]

the gradient really Is a great tip. I've been asking for actual calculated distance based reflection falloff for a while now. I'm still not sure why they haven't been able to do it yet. Although it may take longer, the setup is faster. And sometimes the time is in the setup if you have overnight to render one image. Not always, but that's often the case for us here. Might have 4 hours to get an image ready for submitting. That means, very little testing, and barely enough time for material setup. So we usually do a couple quick lighting tests, set cameras, then submit the same render with both glossy and non-glossy versions of the same shot, often rendering glass alone as chrome to get reflections (only if time is Really short since refractions often take some time to make look right, so instead this just skips them), and render out a pass with light materials with red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow so we can get clean selections (with a little halo, but not bad) in photoshop later using channels.
It's not a perfect workflow, but when you need to finish in less than 8 hours of working time at 6k renderings it's pretty good.
Wow, that was a lot for being way off topic.

One trick would be to kill reflections on the glossy layer all together. Try using your environment map, assuming you are using one globally, in the color channel. Just use whatever percentage as you would want it reflective. Blur it according to how glossy you want the material, and turn off raytracing.
Use a blend material to add a gloss layer, just use a 100% transparent material so it only adds reflections, on top of that to add a little reflections of your real objects, but at less of a cost to the total render time.

The glossy objects using close to .5 gloss level don't need to be nearly as accurate as anything else, so why raytrace them if you don't have to? This technique doesn't work for all situations of course, but might help you out for this instance it sounds.

[simmsimaging]

Thanks, also a good tip.

b