Help with the physics of light and cameras close to the ground (wet roads, etc).

[KiloWattson]

VRay 3.1 for Maya

Hey guys, so I have a camera on a bridge. It's low to the ground and looking forward at a bus coming along the bridge. The road is SUPPOSED to be wet and reflective, but it's sunny so just after the rain.

I have reflection maps, dome textured light for GI/IBL and a VRay Sun.

If I have the camera up high pointed down towards the road, I can see a glaring wet reflection which looks nice.

As soon as I lower the camera and put it close to the road looking down the length of it, all the shiny reflectivity goes away.

I'm guessing this has to do with the physics of indices of reflection/refraction etc, but I'm not quite sure and don't know where to start when figuring out what settings to tweak.

[Morbid Angel]

Its a glancing angle reflection. Probably what happened in your case is when you were looking from above, it was tracing a bright spot in the dome light. When you changed the camera position that bright spot is no longer traced since the angle is different.

So you can either rotate your dome to get that highlite back, or drop a light there and set it up so it reflects properly from that camera angle.