Hi all
How can I get a glossy specular on a material, without getting any reflection? As in I want highlight glossies, but no reflection
So for example if I set the colour swatch to pure white, highlight glossies on 0.7 and leave reflection glossy on 1
The reflection glossy is the problem. no matter what this value is, it still reflects stuff, but I only want highlight glossies.
Hopefully I’m explaining it in a way to easily understand?
Turn off “trace reflections” from the material options. That way you will get specular only.
Out of curiosity, why do you want that?
One example could be to add an additional spec layer on a material.
Another example, when having a lot of glossy objects, and inspecting the reflection vs specular passes we can win some rendertime cutting off those reflection which are almost invisible, when the hole effect lays on specular mostly.
Makes sense!
Does that extra time make a massive difference in animation? Print wise, I’ve just dealt with the render times 
‘extra time’ is a lot less if you use mini maxscripts to do it for you, You can easily turn off reflections based on some settings like if the glossy is less than x, fresnel on and reflection value or map overall look is darker than gray, or any of the material properties you decide makes sense to consider. Same way I do with reflection/refraction depth…at the end I have to inspect the passes and maybe tweak something individually, but the amount of rendertime we win for animations it’s minutes*frame count = a lot! but doesn’t make much sense for stills.
I was going to say! Seems like an alien workflow to me.
Print is so simple, just slap some shaders on a fresh HDR preset scene and go. HDR light studio handles the difference
You guys should look up the GGX shader for vray.
Very much so. I’ve got semi transparent (animated) curtains hit by sunlight i’m rendering right now… trace reflections on nearly doubles my render time and it’s near impossible to tell the difference. there’s a slight difference when you flick between them - but you cant tell why. The specular highlight is essential to the look of them though.