i need to render orthographic views (not camera) and get wrong (or right, depending on how you see it) environment reflections and highlights. i think i understand why this is happening, but does anyone know a way to render orthographic environment reflections more like perspective ones?
here’s an example:
Bit of a cheat but maybe make a really far away Camera with a tiny fov? Thinking about it I wonder would you actually get a similar result due to all of the reflection rays converging on very small area of the reflection environment?
it’s in a scripted pipeline, so i really wanted to avoid using cameras (mostly because of time issues and my messed up FOV calculations…)
…and yeah, that thought hit me too, if i went with the far away camera hack, wouldn’t the results just end up similar?
Maybe instead on an environment which is infinitely far use a sphere that’s a lot closer to the object? You might at least get the reflection rays hitting more pixels of the reflection map - might still look odd though?
yeah, i did try that somwhere along the line, it got better (if i remember correctly), but caused another problem since i am actually using two reflection environments; one regular and one mapped to a material environment slot. if there was a way to exclude/include the dome from reflection on a material basis i would be good to go, but as far as i’ve understood this cannot be done yet. if i’m not mistaken, its being discussed here : http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?51020-VRayMtl-Include-Exclude-Lists/page2
…can of worms as vlado correctly describes it 
Yeah it seems as the environment override is possibly through local material environments, but not object. Might be something where you’d have to hide / unhide in your scripted pipeline instead 
actually there was a post today regarding sending parameters at rendertime, pretty cool, but i don’t think i can use this approach since it’s all rendered in one go.
hmhm, i think the most viable solution is to skip the material environment and just settle for the single environment in a dome, thanks for your thoughts connell it’s good to know i’m still online with these things
Those crazy spherical harmonics that the maya people talk about sound like they could be useful for this - either that or some kind of 2d relighting to allow you to add on reflections in 2d afterwards?
aah, yes, spherical harmonics what a wonderful name, i remember that crazy talk
unfortunately, any post work is also out of the equation regarding this, all renders have to be used as they are. tricky little bugger.
Back to the scanline 
oh yeah, those were the times my friend
Matthias malmer in Syndicate is probably still using it with his amazingly quick in house GI fake
Scanline produces the exact same effect…
Best regards,
Vlado
All rays are created equal
