Since glossies add to rendering time, I was wondering if it would be possible to add a feature to current glossies, so that a simple blur would be applied to the specified sections. It wouldn’t even have to be physically accurate, but more of a post-process sort of ‘hack’ that would benefit animations in particular.
What about the LC for the glossies?
What also might be uselful is a LC just for glossies. So if you use something other than LC (IRM & QMC) you can still have the faster glossies?
theres actually a plugin that can already do that. I just wish i remembered what it was called.
Surface Blur?
its indeed a cool plugin. gave it a test just now. however there is a number of limitations with it:
1 - no support for vray frame buffer, since its a 3ds max post process. Hance no support for gbuffer render elements.
2 - no support for motion blur.
3 - bad processing of overlaping objects. i.e. objects that are partially infront of blurred reflections will cause artifacts.
4 - things like bump map will be blurred along with the surface
5 - if the surface is displaced, its displacement will be artifacted by the blur.
but having outlined these points, I would say that this plugin is designed for 3ds max. It happens to support vray functions. It would be indeed awesome to have vlado look into similar principal. Which can resolve the above issues.
You can sort of get a similar effect if you use the “Interpolation option” for the reflections… Use very high glossiness value (e.g. 0.99) with 1 subdiv, and then use the interpolation controls to blur that.
Best regards,
Vlado
ya that was it. like morbid said, it certainly wasn’t perfect, but did actually work to a degree with vray. I thought it worked decent for stills where you have alot of flat glossy surfaces like a kitchen or something.
Works really well…thanks.
How does that work for animations? I usually turn them off in that situation due to noise.
Well, since the reflections have high glossiness (0.99) they don’t flicker that much.
Best regards,
Vlado