Vray Light set to INVISIBLE is still visible in reflections

[cpnichols]

@cpnichols: was no offense just not because things are old, they are bad and usless ...

I have this argument all the time... and my answer is yes it is (when it comes to rendering engines). This isn't cool old like LPs and retro Converse shoes. Trust me, if people could get renderman to do glossies reflections like Vray, they would not be doing fake specular highlights. Keep in mind that we are talking about a program so old that shadow maps are usually the only way to go, and that they can't upgrade to the new multi-core CPUs because Renderman is STILL not multi-threaded.

I'm with Vlado. Why do you need it? Beyond the reason of, "it is just nice to have it." This just makes it seem like a crutch. What aesthetic reason is there? What technical reasons are there? Can you give us a scene to show it's need? Give us a good solid example. I would be curious to know, I may be missing something.

[percydaman]

Im all for moving forward with technologies and rendering quality, and I see everyone's point with regard to that, but chris, something you need to keep in mind, is that not everybodies client needs complete physically correct reflections, nor would they even recognize the lack thereof in certain areas. Adding better controlled fake speculars, wouldn't step on your 'physically correct' specular reflections, so why would you advocate the reverse?

There's plenty of things in vray I dont use or dont use on a regular basis, why should fake speculars be any different? Give us the control we require, let US decide whether we wish to use it or not.

[jacksc02]

well said Percy.

[studioDIM]

I'm with Vlado. Why do you need it? Beyond the reason of, "it is just nice to have it." This just makes it seem like a crutch. What aesthetic reason is there? What technical reasons are there? Can you give us a scene to show it's need? Give us a good solid example. I would be curious to know, I may be missing something.

For instance, say you set the VRay material to have the specular glossiness unlocked from the reflection (which remains at 1.0 glossiness), so to have "fake" speculars, but a raytraced reflection of the environment.
The square arealight would still be reflected, likely covering part of the specular.
Turning raytraced reflections off entirely would not be viable, as the rest of the stuff in the scene wouldn't be properly reflected.
And if the light, when turned off in reflections, doesn't generate speculars as well, you have to resort to the trick of adding a standard max light to generate them.

All in all, it doesn't sound that bad a request, to me.

This said, i might have missed bits

Lele

[cpnichols]

Im all for moving forward with technologies and rendering quality, and I see everyone's point with regard to that, but chris, something you need to keep in mind, is that not everybodies client needs complete physically correct reflections, nor would they even recognize the lack thereof in certain areas. Adding better controlled fake speculars, wouldn't step on your 'physically correct' specular reflections, so why would you advocate the reverse?

There's plenty of things in vray I don't use or don't use on a regular basis, why should fake speculars be any different? Give us the control we require, let US decide whether we wish to use it or not.

Percy... that does not make much sense. The reflection and the fake spec both follow the same BRDF model. You don't have more "control" of it. You simply have end up having a fake looking reflection of a light source that has the same shape. The ONLY reason I could see that one would want this is because if might be slightly faster to fake the spec instead of reflecting it, but Vray is so fast at it, I don't see the point.

The reason I advocate for pure reflections, maybe the same reason possibly that I believe Vlado has not added fake ones (even if it is easy for him to do as he says), is that it has "bad habit" written all over it. While we are at it, why not add a VrayShadowMaps, or a VrayGouraud shader.

Keep in mind that Vray raytraces everything, which is a luxury to most old rendering engines. The idea of a fake spec was because it wanted to make a highlight without raytracing.... a very clever trick for scanline rendering at the time.

Lele's point I guess makes some sense... but I would never do that myself.

OK... flame war over (for me...)... I'll shut up now.

[Da_elf]

i personally see a huuuge need for old technology. It means that my competition gets to ignorantly use it and have really nice looking "3d" image and i can use vray and get way better images thus stealing their clients from them

[mcvltd]

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

I was after this very feature a couple of months back.

My reasoning -

I have a yacht that I want to render against a black background.

The yacht is sitting on black reflective water. The effect I was after was to have the water fading off to black (into the background), so that only the reflection of the boat was visable in the water.

I wanted the yacht to be rim lit by a nice big area light. It looked fantastic on the yacht.

It also showed up in the reflection of the water - my 'fade to black' for the water surface was ruined.

Quick fix - disable the reflection of the rim light in the water surface only.

Long fix - (which I had to do) render two images, one of the boat with rim lighting and one of the boat in the water with no rim lighting. Then slap the rim lit image over the top of the water image in photoshop afterwards.

The quick fix would have saved me time (= money)

I understand and appreciate that vray is more related to 'real world' setups, it's just that some of the images that I have to produce aren't real world - but look nice.

Rob.

[percydaman]

Im all for moving forward with technologies and rendering quality, and I see everyone's point with regard to that, but chris, something you need to keep in mind, is that not everybodies client needs complete physically correct reflections, nor would they even recognize the lack thereof in certain areas. Adding better controlled fake speculars, wouldn't step on your 'physically correct' specular reflections, so why would you advocate the reverse?

There's plenty of things in vray I don't use or don't use on a regular basis, why should fake speculars be any different? Give us the control we require, let US decide whether we wish to use it or not.

Percy... that does not make much sense. The reflection and the fake spec both follow the same BRDF model. You don't have more "control" of it. You simply have end up having a fake looking reflection of a light source that has the same shape. The ONLY reason I could see that one would want this is because if might be slightly faster to fake the spec instead of reflecting it, but Vray is so fast at it, I don't see the point.

The reason I advocate for pure reflections, maybe the same reason possibly that I believe Vlado has not added fake ones (even if it is easy for him to do as he says), is that it has "bad habit" written all over it. While we are at it, why not add a VrayShadowMaps, or a VrayGouraud shader.

Keep in mind that Vray raytraces everything, which is a luxury to most old rendering engines. The idea of a fake spec was because it wanted to make a highlight without raytracing.... a very clever trick for scanline rendering at the time.

Lele's point I guess makes some sense... but I would never do that myself.

OK... flame war over (for me...)... I'll shut up now.

how does it not make sense? My point was that it hurts nothing to be able to include some 'older' methods while still keeping the new. I have clients in the arch vis industry ( and I know your arch vis background) that needs things done pretty darn quick, so proper glossy reflections are just out...period. Does that mean I shouldn't have some sort of specular highlights either? I would hope that you would agree that it would be a mistake to completely remove the ability to use faked specular reflections when the situation calls for it. So if we can agree that there might be times that specular fakes are warranted (whether I agree with them or not) then whats wrong with fleshing out the approach a little bit more to give us more control.

Taking your argument to its logical conclusion, we should all just be using maxwell render, and be done with it, since vray employs alot of 'fakes' compared to maxwell.

anyways, im not here to flame either, but its monday, which makes it good for discussions

[RErender]

again, well said Percy

[meanadam]

I want to hide in reflections too!

My reason is this:
Clients with bad designs require fake lighting. It is harder to fake it when the fakers are caught in the reflections.

[ShaunDon]

V-Ray is damn fast, but for many of us it's still not fast enough. When I'm working on an archviz animation, given the complexity of the scenes it's almost impossible to get low enough render times that also are free of grain and artifacts to make the deadline. I always try to be as real as possible, and I'm having a lot more luck working linearly (less light = faster renders), but I'll still fake specs on smaller objects where I want the edge highlight but can't afford the extra reflective bounces and rendertime necessary to prudce a solid image.

Also when I'm doing quick schematic renderings, the ability to fake lets me add a glossy element in a specific place without affecting everything else. As long as it's clear to the user that this is deviating from the norm, the more flexibility that I have to adjust an image the better.

I think V-Ray does a good job of allowing both. Restricting them to a certain path is only going to frustrate more users. Maybe they'll learn the right way of doing things a bit faster, but they won't be thrilled about it.

Shaun

[glyph]

should the fake glossy highlight option also be removed ?

the glossies are not as silky smooth or 'real' but they render a load faster and get the point across - it depends on the job requirement

a flexible tool should not impose its methods on the users!
there's always going to be a big requirement for masssaged realism

[cpnichols]

First off, let me say that I owe you guys a bit of a apology as I realize now that I come from a different perspective. In the line of work that I come from, realism is the only goal and "cheaper" shortcuts are not an option if you want to be competitive. So things like fake specs, Ambient Occlusion (except for the occasional contact shadow integration), Shadow maps, etc... are not an option. The reason Vray works better than Maxwell (since someone brought it up) is not because it can give you the option to fake things, is because it can give you photorealism much much faster without compromising speed. Granted this is through its adaptive nature as opposed to an unbiased nature, but that is a different argument.

So granted some of you see a need for it, and I should respect it. I see none, but I come from a different perspective.

[jacksc02]

well said chris

[RErender]

Now that's the spirit.

V-Ray is an incredible tool, never has a renderer been so usable for so many of the different 3D sectors. I would hope it remains that way. I dare say that us ArchViz guys did more than our share to support V-Ray through the years being the first to widely adopt V-Ray as the tool of choice. It is very cool to see it maturing and being adopted into more and more high budget fx work and onto the silver screen. In the future there will be no need for any cheats, computational power will be abundant but as it is now us Viz guys need to take a few short cuts. Our studio renders up to 300,000 frames/passes a month we cannot afford even 1 hour render times.