Choppy reflections - How to fix?

[PsychoGenetiX]

Well, I've made a chrome-like material and softened the edges of the object I applied it to. when the material reflects the environment, the reflections "chop up" along the faces and aren't very smooth. It just looks like the cylinder is a complex 10-vertex polygon that I push-pulled up. Can I make it so that the reflections dont chop up between faces and that it would look smooth, or do I have to make chrome objects THAT badly complicated to get that look?

[stevebo]

Re: Choppy reflections - How to fix?

A few techniques to this...

Say you were to make a cylinder, a cylinder is circle that is extruded out. That circle is a polygon that is composed of a number of lines that wrap around to create a round form. The more lines there is, the smoother it is, and hence the smoother the initial circle is, the smoother the cylinder becomes. To increase the number of segments in the circle, select the polyline of the circle and go to entity info. There you adjust the number of segments.

Another thing you can do is to select the faces of the cylinder or sphere or whatever you're working with and then right click and select "soften edges". There you can adjust the amount of softening you need.

A strange little thing you can do which some people have picked up upon is that say you have a sphere that renders out faceted, you can group it, then ungroup it and regroup it. Then it'll render out smoothly. Strange...

[PsychoGenetiX]

Re: Choppy reflections - How to fix?

yes but that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Say I forgot to make the circle with more lines, and the cylinder renders out faceted even though in regular Sketchup it seems smooth. I'm asking how I can get the cylinder to look smooth rather than faceted in the render.
Here, I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about:

Rendered:


Unrendered:


(The images belong to me)

Also, the glass I made that covers the cylinders is reflective and the reflections on it are choppy as well.
See, in the model, the cylinders look smooth and great, but in the render, they come out faceted and the reflections look horrid.
How do I solve this problem without having to redo the whole thing? as you see, it took me a bit of work to do and I have to mess around with the whole model.

[thomthom]

Re: Choppy reflections - How to fix?

What version of VfSU do you use? (It'd useful to post this when asking questions.)
The previous version had a bug where when you applied material to the outside of groups/components the smooth geometry inside would appear faceted. Not sure if there where other things as well that would cause this. But it was a known bug.

[PsychoGenetiX]

Re: Choppy reflections - How to fix?

1.05, sketchup 7. Updating Vray...
well I updated to the latest version and now it just won't render. I've checked out another thread about the no render thing, and tried everything and then it turned out that the problem THEY had was caused by something I don't have in my scene, which is alot of trees. Now I'm stuck and can't even render and I can't figure out what causes either of the two problems I've presented in this thread. Thanks.

[stevebo]

Re: Choppy reflections - How to fix?

Have you tried to new debugging tools?

Not being able to render is often a material problem.

[PsychoGenetiX]

Re: Choppy reflections - How to fix?

"Tried everything" means everything man. I tried all of them. this specific scene just won't render. If I make a circle in an empty scene and render it works fine, but if I copy and paste the model into a new file it doesn't.