Flat Mirror Query

[olly]

Hi,

We are conidering buying the advanced vRay renderer and we're wondering if there's a way for vRay to render the native "Flat Mirror" map in 3dsmax 5.1?

Of course we are impressed by the GI (speed/quality), but we are also impressed by the speed of non GI/Raytraced rendering compared to the 3dsmax Scanline renderer. This is why we're thinking of moving to vRay for all our rendering in 3dsmax 5.1, but we have hit the flat mirror stumbling block. Some jobs just don't require raytraced ref's or don't have the timeframe for raytraced ref's, so we use Flat Mirror's sparingly.

Are we misunderstanding vRay's intended use? And does anyone else have any thoughts on the matter?

Thanks for your time...
Olly.

[flipside]

Don't really know an answer, but I think you deserve one, so maybe now some more people will read this post if it gets bumped up again...

regards,

flipside

[DanielBrew]

Hi Olly

Currently, there no way to render Max's 'Flat Mirror' within Vray. I can't speak for the delelopers but I doubt whether it will be implemented in future.

However, I would be surprised if Vray's raytracing was slower bounce for bounce than Max's rendering of reflect/ refract maps. Its just that 'flat mirror' is generally only applied to a few faces on a mesh.

I too used 'flat mirror' extensively in max and liked the way you could blur the reflections without a noticeable slowdown in render times. When I started using Vray I thought that I would still have to continue to render some projects in Max. However over the months I have become (slightly) better at judging the settings for GI and for interpolated reflections etc. and now I can't imagine having to going back to max. Obviously it depends on the kind of work you do.

I hope this answers some of your questions,

Dan

[JSable]

Just curious, but can you maybe make a multi/subobject material with one of the mats being a ~100% reflection Vray mat, then just assign the faces of the object to that material id to do the same thing?

[olly]

It isn't the application of a Flat Mirror to specific faces that makes it our preffered choice, it's the speed...

Cheers,
Olly.

[mike_kennedy]

I did a scene recently that used flat mirrors and VRAY free (Slow version) rendered it fater than Max's Flat mirrors. I used VRAY for the scene from that point on. The only thing I find faster in max is thin wall refractions vs raytraced Vray refractions, but other than that go Vray.

[olly]

Are you saying that you used Flat Mirror's and vRay Render or that you substituted Flat Mirrors for vRay Reflection maps?

Thanks for your time,
Olly.

[mike_kennedy]

In almost every situation I find VRAY reflections are faster than Flat Mirror.
Try testing using the demo.

[mike_kennedy]

Sorry, Didn't read carefully.
I went in a changed the flat mirror to a VRAY map in the material that contained the flat mirror. It was actually a lot faster because it was acomplex scene and VRAY renders reflections a lot more selectively than flat mirrors from what I could surmise.