Glossy Reflections ?

[bernhard]

Hi all,

what you think would be a very good way to fake glossy reflections ?
Is it even possible with good looking results ?

thx for all your ideas !

[Morbid Angel]

That would depend on what you want to fake. If you want to reflect objects around the scene, its nearly impossible to get a reasonably fake glossy reflection which actually raytraces the objects. The next best alternative is to use ambient occlusion texture in reflective mode, which can also be made glossy. It will not reflect objects, rather just trace their silhouettes but it can blur the environment.
Interpolating reflection can also help, but you may know that it is not very good in animations.

[bernhard]

thx for your input... yes.. interpolation is not an option for animation... for a still it may work, but my goal is to find perhaps a workaround and fake glossy reflections inside the render process.
not sure about what you mean with the AO texture in reflective mode ?
If you don't mind, would you like to explain a bit more ?

thx for your input,
like always - highly appreciated !

[Morbid Angel]

if you create a vray light material and place vray dirt into it and set it to reflective mode, it will reflect the environment. Give it a try.
There was also a plugin a long time ago which did blurry reflections as a post process. But like any fake, it was very limited, one problem was it didn't work with vray frame buffer (since it was a post process) at that time.
Why do you need to create a fake anyway? the reflections aren't that expensive these days, besides some special cases.

[bernhard]

ok.. let's see how the vray light fake works out... yeah, the post work or post effects.. that's something I really don't want to touch right now, I really was wondering if there is any other way inside vray to fake the glossy reflections.
well.. I know that glossy reflections aren't anymore so expensive with vray.. but if you are limited with render power for animation, it could be very helpful.

but on the other side.. glossy reflections do still have a very strong impact to the render time... at least the way I render and setup shaders....

[Morbid Angel]

if this was up to me to make it happen, here is what I would try:

if this is an interior you are rendering...render an hdr of your interior and use that as your environment map for the reflections, where vray dirt in reflective mode blurs the reflections, not reflecting objects into it self. It will be more or less fast, but of course not accurate

[bernhard]

hmm.. did you ever run some animation tests with that ?

[Morbid Angel]

sure animations is all I do.