Hi Joelaff. thnaks for your helpful comments! Sorry for the delayed reply. Just gettign back form travels.
There is no black wood on the house. There are flat horizontal metal panels and corrugated vertical metal panels.The window frames, fascia, railings and steel posts are all painted black. I do have separate materials on each and may have gone too far making them all look “black” and thus very much the same. I have a good bit of reflection on all the materials but could have boosted it on some. The flat metal panels have the highest reflective value.
I find, and experienced on this, that thee is a single digit point where no reflectivity is appraent then up the reflection value fro say 10 to 11 and suddenly big difference. Hard to get very minor variations of reflectivity in black materials. It’s a revit model provided by others so not much of the geometry has chamfered or radiused edges. Most, possibly all, the materials I apply use a vray edges texture with radius 1/8-1/4.
Also regarding reflections, originally I had just the Vray HDRi reflection in the windows and it did not look good. So I added a plane with a vray light material and bitmap photo of surrounding mountainside material positioned to reflect in the windows. Plane object properties do not cast shadows, do not accept shadows. Plane vray properties do not receive or generate GI.
That little bit of reflection in the windows was a nice add BUT the plane then was blocking quite a bit of the reflection that the HDRI had previously created on a lot of the other materials, esp fascia, window frames, railings and etc. Sort of a catch 22. Maybe there is a better setup or something I need to enable in properties so the reflection Plane would not then alter all the other reflection characteristics created by the hdri?
Thanks again!