How do you make something shiny without being reflective?

[timmatron]

I feel silly for asking this question, because in Max standard materials its easy. It doesn't reflect anything unless you add raytrace to it, but you can still control specular level and glossiness.

But in Vray materials, the only way I know how to make something shiny or glossy is to add reflectance, but of course this always adds render time.

Is there a simple thing that I'm just missing here?

Any answers would be most humbly appreciated.

thanks!

[natty]

Hi timmatron
what you need to do is, make the reflection colour Grey then set the Glossyness to around 0.4 - 0.8 then the Glossy Subdivs to around 50 and tick Use Interpolation.

[RErender]

It is possible to get a fake specular by unchecking "trace reflections" ,setting reflection amount to about 50% and adjusting the glossiness. Anisostropy works even with trace reflections turned off. Adding an omni to the scene with only specular will allow more control allowing you to adjust the brightness of the highlights with the light multiplier. For a quasi reflection map try adding a bitmap to the reflect slot of the vraymtl and setting it to environment mapping lower the amount for a subtle effect.

[cocolas]

thanks guys, from my part.....
many times I run into this problem as well w/ vrayMats and have a hard time getting the shine w/out the reflections......

paul.

[timmatron]

Thanks a bunch guys. I'll give it a shot as soon as I get a spare moment.

Tim

[timmatron]

Wow. Good solutions from both of you! I set up a simple test to see what the difference between them would be

Natty's solution gave very good relults - fairly accurate I'm sure. The render time was 13 seconds.

RErender's solution was excellent too. I unchecked 'trace reflections' and the render time when down to about 8 seconds, and it still gave the impression of the material having glossiness to it - just not as detailed & realistic.

Will come in very handy though for very complex scenes that I need to cheat a bit.

Thanks so much!

[Matt_3D]

Using a shellac material should probably do the trick aswell. Use the vray material as your base and make the shellac material fully transparent and adjust the highlights as needed.

-Matt

[Infrared digital]

Hi

I have found that if the reflection colour is made grey then it will reflect the environment, even if the glossiness is .5 and interpolation is ticked. Is there a way to avoid this using a Vray Material?

The Shellac option works perfectly but does take considerably longer to render.

Thanks

N

[telemaco]

There's a Bluf free plug-in called Highlight-only. Using a shellac with this is almost perfect.

U must install firs the blur lib to run Blur plug-ins.

They can be found here:

http://www.blur.com/Tech/blurbeta_plugin_old


Telémaco

[trixian]

Vray hates shellacs. They render painfully slow in vray for some reason. This is a big pain, because I for one love shelacs, and would like to use them as often as possible. Not possible to do proper skin without it