reflection based on distance.

[andrewjohn81]

This may be more of a max request, but I'm pretty sure vray could do it making a utility that would calculate a ray's distance and return a value that could be applied to different things.

This can be seen, although probably photoshoped in that case, in many of the mac products still shots. The object's reflection isn't blurred at all, but it gives the appearance that the reflection just fades away as it gets too far from the plane.

I basically want to say, this object is reflective to it's full value (whatever value i gave it in max) 0-5inches from the normal and fades to 0% at 12inches. That would probably be the most complex thing I would personally use.

It's not physically correct by any means, but it would be a handy control to get the effect we need sometimes. You might also plug the distance into other things like glossiness. I ran it by the guys here and they said they would all use it quite a bit. Hopefully this isn't an isolated request.

[ene.xis]

i d use the search tool to dig it up on the forum...i m not sure, but i bet u ll find something on it!

[vance3d]

couldn't you use a distance blend falloff type to get that effect. you can have that work off the objects distance from the camera or another object.
and you can set the color chips to white for the close distance and black to the far distance.

maybe that will do what you want.

V Miller

[RErender]

Remember this is the wishlist forum guys, not the help area

Something like this could be usefull for displacement too

[andrewjohn81]

I've done the search, but thanks.

All I could find were things that would change based on distance from an object or the camera. I want vray to actually calculate the distance of the ray and return a usable value.

Create a plane on the ground, then if you try and calculate distance from the plane to an object straight above it you'll always return a constant result. It merely finds the distance between the plane and the object's pivot. I want it to find the distance between a Point on the plane, and a Point on the object. It needs to do that for every ray cast at the plane.

Yes, that could be used for displacement as well to get some cool results.

[DP]

max had this in it's old default renderer, in the raytrace shader IIRC...handy for studio shots, but as vray seems to be quite tied in with illumination and tracing, i'm not sure how it would handle it.

[andrewjohn81]

I might be way off here, but isn't this kind of how the glossy effect works? Close to the object things are in focus, far away they are blurry.

I wonder if there is a way to right some similar code, but instead of blurring the object, make it transparent?

[instinct]

it happens automatically for glossy reflections. Glossies are basically the avarage of many rays shot out in a cone. and naturally the further away a hit occures the further away are the rays hitting it...

[joconnell]

Yup - The effect you're talking about doesn't occur in real life though unless you have some kind of smoky volume that starts to mask off the shape - Light doesn't fall off in that fashion so glossy effects are the only way to get something similar. Alternatively you're talking about render custom mattes to mask off the reflections or vlado would have to make a new feature of it.

[andrewjohn81]

yeah, I know that doesn't happen in real life, although a feature that would be nice is to give glossy effects a start and stop point based on distance.

This is something that is asked for quite often. It's super easy to do for still shots because we just use photoshop, but it's much harder to do in an animation. They seem to always have this effect in phone advertisements and many mac advertisements.

Another thing I was hoping to get from this was being able to reflect objects that were close up, and not reflecting the environment at all. Although, that would be nice to have as a checkbox whether the effect would change the environment or not.

[zoobadoo]

another good thing might be that it's a lot faster to render compared to glossies. i remember fading in native max raytracing is relatively fast.

it's an unreal function, but we need those as well

[k-arts]

I've been there!
I alway do that workaround via an instanced uvwMap controlling a falloff of its opacity. ... Yeah on each and every object
so i render the reflection as a single layer.

cheers

[andrewjohn81]

mirroring the geometry to get a reflection only works for the ground though. That's the downside.

[gagui]

I think this effect is called "absortion" in final render. Very useful.
I want this feature in vray too.