vray doesn’t use the max raytracer. Use the vray material. Personally, I dont miss raytrace attenuation, as vrays raytracer is so much faster than max’s that its unneccesary. And I use the falloff map to achieve less reflection based upon incidence angle anyways.
The only time I really ever used attenuation (pre-vray, of course) was to reduce render times by limiting how much the raytracer “saw” and had to reflect. Also, attenuation created an effect similar to glossy reflections, but it was always just a workaround…
I’m perfectly happy with vray’s reflections as is, and in my opinion, it would only limit the realism of a scene by attenuating the reflections.
the want of attenuation for us has cropped up a few times as it can speed up rendering of scenes where complex geometry needs to be reflected close by but not by objects far away…glossiness achieves this by blurring but i suspect its still calculating the effect on objects far away even though the wont be seen. Would be nice to have as a feature just when the need does arise.