Reflection Depth Falloff Color

[bradon]

currently when I have a material that has less reflection traces than it "actually" needs to penetrate the scene. So if I have 4 glass objects in front of one another yet only use 2 traces i can see black in my glass objects. even if I set the reflection and refraction environment to a bright white the falloff color when the raytracer runs out of ray traces the color will still falloff to black. is there some way to avoid this? to perhaps set the color to white or better yet use an env texture?

[Reaversword]

Get up the raytrace in the material section or leave it to 0 and go to render globals, from there, adjust the global parameter of raytraced refractions/reflections

[vladimir.nedev]

We'll be adding an optional color to use when the reflective/refractive rays run out of depth. In V-Ray for 3ds Max this is called "Exit color". So to answer your question, currently there is no way to avoid the black color, beside increasing the reflection/refraction depth.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[bradon]

ok ill give it a go to increase the rays, unfortunately this will cost me a load of render time . perhaps I can level it out in post to remove some black its unfortunate to have to rely on hacks though. Thanks.

[bradon]

unfortunatly my increasing the rays is a somewhat unacceptable solution. it cost me too much render time. I have chrome and water material that when I increase the bounces from 2-3-4 depth it just puts it out of the range of "renderability" for our studios render power we. we need to find a way to control the exit color better than just falling off to black, its ruining the look of nice chrome and water making it too dark. problem is the refraction exit color is married to the image so any image manipulation i do is to the whole image where I just want to effect the exit color. my best bet is to just pull a dirty key from the image which of course would be pretty sloppy. is there a render element that i can at least make a matt for the exit color then use a nice matte to key out the black color in post? only other solution I can think of is to render the scene AGAIN by applying a white material to all the other surfaces except my "water" so that it will produce a black and white matte for the exit color to be used in post in a more clean way. however this will require me to rener my image TWICE so at the end of the day im not sure thats actually going to "save" me any rendertime.

[bradon]

any news on getting exit color as a feature for us maya guys.. we will need this very badly on an upcomming project because we have a lot of glass. perhaps its available in a nightly build?

[rodeo-ny]

This was recently added to the vraymtl plugin. Not sure if its in the maya ui yet, check the latest builds.

[vladimir.nedev]

The VRayMtl in Maya is not actually exported to the VRayMtl plug-in (not yet at least), so that implementation cannot be used directly for now. I'll bump the priority on the exit color issue.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev