Reflection Glossiness as Fresnel Switch

[davision]

Somewhere Vlado put up a thread where he was test rendering a plane with a fine bumpy displacement, and he noticed that the apparent glossiness of the plane changed as it rotated away from perpindicular (to the camera). This makes perfect sense to me -- and I'm fairly sure (can't find the thread) Vlado said that adding a falloff to the glossiness map would achieve the same effect.

If so... couldn't we just have a Frensel switch (like we have for reflection and refraction) that creates this changing glossiness automatically without bothering with a falloff map?

I guess this begs the question -- is this necessary at all -- maybe the renderer makes surfaces appear less glossy as they rotate away from perpindicular automatically? I have no idea... it's too technical for my head and I can't do a bunch of testing right now.

[v_wrangler]

Re: Reflection Glossiness as Fresnel Switch

While I agree that an automatic fresnel switch lessens the burden, I think the current situation where you are able to manually add (and control) the falloff is much desirable. Sometimes - you may want to mask the glossiness with noise or any other map for that matter - an automatic fresnel switch may make that more complicated.

[davision]

I don't think it would be more complicated. It would be identical to how reflection "strength" and refraction work now. You could enable the switch or disable it if you want to use a map. I do this all the time when I make a custom falloff map for my reflections.

[v_wrangler]

I don't think it would be more complicated. It would be identical to how reflection "strength" and refraction work now. You could enable the switch or disable it if you want to use a map. I do this all the time when I make a custom falloff map for my reflections.

I guess I missed that. Now I understand. As long as its mappable then I guess it would be fine.