Matte and reflection mental ray style?

[Tycane]

Hey there.

At our studio i do a lot of product visualizations for big clients, and most of these clients have very specific guidelines as to how a certain thing should look, for example : the floor has to be perfect white and may only reflect 40% of the model.

Now i have been using vray for a long time, but for these types of jobs i tend to go for mental ray, simply because it lets me set up reflection distance and because it is able to make a matte/shadow material wich not only puts the shadow in the alpha but also the reflection. Something that is really important for these types of jobs.

Maybe i just havent found it, but for the life of me i cant get vray to do either of these functions. I know you can adjust the glossyness so it sorta does 40% reflection, but its not usefull if you want sharp reflections.

Now especially with Vray rt's release (wich is totally awesome btw) i can cut my(our) production time by a lot, if only i knew how to get those 2 things working, because without it its a total hassle and i am sorta forced to use mental ray.
I googled for it, i sent a mail to vray support 2 weeks ago and no real answer to date.
(i tried using the arch and design shader with vray but those functions wont work)

So in short, can i output reflections in the alpha of a matte shadow and can i set-up a reflection distance?, how?, and if not, is this something we can expect in the future?
Most other render programs can do it and it seems like something people (like me) would want.

Thanks in advance

Kevin Beckers
www.Indg.nl

[Tycane]

No takers?.....Is it a weird question or is the solution so simple nobody wants to answer, or is there no solution?

[nils_p]

I've alsp asked this question before here. From what I know is that Vray doesn't have any direct method for doing this.

You should probably do this with the render elements

[muoto]

I do a lot of shop 3D's where the client want a nice clean white floor with reflection.
What i do is a White vraymtl with over that a vraymtlblend with reflection and some vraydirt.
it works perfectly and i am quite able to control the "white" value and the reflection.

[nils_p]

Yeah that should be easy. But If you want to composite the image onto another background(color) You still see the ground plane

[stef.thomas]

By 40% do you mean 40% of the height of the bottle rather than the amount of reflection? If your problem is relating to falloff then try applying a perpendicular/parallel falloff map and go into the mix curve editor. create a point in the middle then drag it down to the bottom right hand corner. By adjusting the position of this point and the bezier handles you can get as sharp or smooth falloff as you like. If you have RT then that will make it much easier to set up.

[Tycane]

Hi.

Thanks for the tips.
The suggestions given i tried and sometimes use, the thing is (should have mentioned it), all of the above works fine for single stills, the problems come when its about animations.
See i am controlling the workflow of these projects and i dont want to have any post-work on the images, simply because it will become an incredible hassle to do proper post work for 100's of frames in a very short time.
Its possible ofcourse but i would rather not go into afterFX or photoshop post render, because its another shackle in the chain that could go wrong or take a lot of time.

With mental ray we can create the stills without having to do any post work, just set up the scene properly, render it, send it out as png with an alpha containing everything so the client can then use it for anything. I was really hoping to use vray in the future because of its (imo) superior render quality when it comes to these types of jobs and ofcourse vray RT.

WIth 40% i mean 40% of the height of the bottle, really like the arch and design shader's reflection distance.

Its a shame to see that vray still doesnt have these functions, perhaps it would be a good idea for a new release someday? (do dev's read these posts?)

Thanks for the responses guys

[48design]

I also have this problem and didn't find any answer...