Vray Light set to INVISIBLE is still visible in reflections

[Markus]

Hi,

this might be a bug.

When I set the vraylight to invisible it is just invisible for the camera but still visible for the relfections.

In my eyes that is not correct. Will RC4 fix that ?

cheers, Markus

[vlado]

You need to uncheck its "Affect specular" option. This will make the light invisible in reflections as well.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Markus]

I see.. thank you vlado.

[Markus]

hmm... but then the spec is of course removed too

i want to have:
- the vraylight not visible the rendering
- the vraylight not visible in the reflections
- BUT the spec on my material

i am sure that was possible in vray 1.4x...

[vlado]

First of all, why would you want that? Specular and reflection are two parts of the same thing - in the real world, specular highlights are just blurred reflections of light sources. One without the other doesn't make much sense (e.g. how do you determine what you want as reflection and what as specular)? Even if you only had specular effects, these would just mimic the actual reflection, which you didn't want in the first place.

(As a work-around, for now you can place an omni light with affect specular only just below your vraylight if you want to get highlights only.)

Best regards,
Vlado

[Markus]

Well, I would want to do that, because I love to tweak as much as possible in my scenes and keep control of everything

I agree with you that it is the same thing. Nevertheless, it is nice to have full control over all those situations and sometime the "realistic" way isnt always the prefered result

I dont see why it doesnt make sense to have a good old specular on standard materials AND the light source is NOT seen in the reflection of others. You are right, there are work-arounds for that with several lights in the scene...

For sure, the blurry reflection way is the more correct and realistic way, but it is slower too.

...so, just a wish from my side for further release

[cpnichols]

Well, I would want to do that, because I love to tweak as much as possible in my scenes and keep control of everything

I agree with you that it is the same thing. Nevertheless, it is nice to have full control over all those situations and sometime the "realistic" way isnt always the prefered result

I dont see why it doesnt make sense to have a good old specular on standard materials AND the light source is NOT seen in the reflection of others. You are right, there are work-arounds for that with several lights in the scene...

For sure, the blurry reflection way is the more correct and realistic way, but it is slower too.

...so, just a wish from my side for further release

Markus... just to let you know Vray's mentality is a move towards real world lighting. Therefore, the users (us) have to move away from old school lighting techniques as they only hurt the way Vray thinks. So having to give up the concept of specular and reflection as being two different things is a key factor. The only reason you think of them as different is because old renders could not render reflections as realistically as Vray does, so they faked specular in the BRDF from the position of the light source... Looks very CG, think toy story. If they had rendered them correctly from the start you would not be used to having them separated. So instead of trying to make Vray act like an outdated rendering engine, try to see if you can shift your mentality and think in more real world lighting. SO... if you want separate reflections from soft reflections, may I suggest using the VrayBlend material which can do exactly that.

[Markus]

cpnichols, I totally understand the concept of vray and the step forward to more realistic "specs", which all the current raytracers are doing.

Nevertheless, calculating extreme blurred reflection takes some time, much more time than the old way. If you set up a nice shader you can get pretty nice results for a lot of less reflective-ultra-blurred materials with the so called "old-way".

When rendering stills I agree that the "realistic" way is the way to got, but when you need to render several thousand frames, with multi-million polygon scenes, you are really happy to save same render time

Btw, toy story is a bad example, i never like the style of it There are a lot of holywood movies in which they still use that "old way" and, you dont wanna say that they look not realistic

[cpnichols]

cpnichols, I totally understand the concept of vray and the step forward to more realistic "specs", which all the current raytracers are doing.

Nevertheless, calculating extreme blurred reflection takes some time, much more time than the old way. If you set up a nice shader you can get pretty nice results for a lot of less reflective-ultra-blurred materials with the so called "old-way".

When rendering stills I agree that the "realistic" way is the way to got, but when you need to render several thousand frames, with multi-million polygon scenes, you are really happy to save same render time

Btw, toy story is a bad example, i never like the style of it There are a lot of holywood movies in which they still use that "old way" and, you don't wanna say that they look not realistic

Well, blurry reflections don't take ask long as you would expect in Vray, which is the whole point. Also, I am very aware of how they use specular in Hollywood movies, having worked on several myself...
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1436759/

However, I can tell you that many are trying to move away from fake specular highlights, which is why so may are interested in the development of rendering engines like Vray, etc...

[RErender]

Well, blurry reflections don't take ask long as you would expect in Vray, which is the whole point. Also, I am very aware of how they use specular in Hollywood movies, having worked on several myself...
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1436759/

It does not seem like such a far step to give more control to the "fake" specualars already in V-Ray...

[joconnell]

Absolutely - I like the way vray works and if anything using true reflections simplifies an awful lot but I can see why people might want this option - quick turn around times with less render power than an l.a. post house doesn't always allow all the nice bits turned on.

[jacksc02]

yeah, I had to change my workflow a lot for this adjustment to vraylights but now im not sure I would go back. There is the old omni workaround which works wonders.

[cpnichols]

Here are a few things you can do which I would never do...
Turn off "trace reflection" in the shader. Now you just have a standard fake spec. If you want, you can combine that (using the VrayBlend) with a reflection amount. Now you get your standard old fashion CG shader.

I would never use this, as it would make things look very non-vray, and loose the quality of the photorealism. But it would get what you want.

[Markus]

@cpnichols: was no offense just not because things are old, they are bad and usless ... btw. great credit list !!!!

to all guys here, thanks for all the helpfull tips

[vlado]

Actually this is a wish that has come up a number of times; it is not a particular problem for V-Ray to give you some kind of fake specular, and I was already considering to add this, but I was curious as to the reasoning behind it.

Best regards,
Vlado