"Environment blur"-map. Blurs environment map based on materials roughness - different roughness for environment and ray traced reflections

[kimmo_hernborg]

Back in the day mental ray for 3ds max had a really useful feature, I think it was call environment blur.

It was a map you put in the environment slot of your material which contained an instance of your HDR-map. The "environment blur"-map blurred the HDR image based on the glossiness value of your material. This meant you only needed one sample for the environment based reflections.

Here´s where it got really useful: you could set a different value for the environment blur map and for the materials glossiness value. That meant the environment reflections of a material could be blurry while the materials ray traced reflections could be sharper. While not physically correct, it gave the illusion of a material being blurry, while speeding up your rendering a lot.

A feature like this would be really useful if you do renderings with lot of metals and its important to have fast render times.

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello kimmo_hernborg,

Apologies for the delayed reply.

For now, we are not planning on implementing such a feature.

This would only work with environment and in most use cases there are other things in the scene. This also wouldn't work if the material has anisotropy. At the moment you can achieve a similar result with a few dome lights, light linking and the "Affect ..." options in the Dome light settings.

I will let you know if we change our position on this. Thank you.