i personally see a huuuge need for old technology. It means that my competition gets to ignorantly use it and have really nice looking “3d” image and i can use vray and get way better images thus stealing their clients from them 
I was after this very feature a couple of months back.
My reasoning -
I have a yacht that I want to render against a black background.
The yacht is sitting on black reflective water. The effect I was after was to have the water fading off to black (into the background), so that only the reflection of the boat was visable in the water.
I wanted the yacht to be rim lit by a nice big area light. It looked fantastic on the yacht.
It also showed up in the reflection of the water - my ‘fade to black’ for the water surface was ruined.
Quick fix - disable the reflection of the rim light in the water surface only.
Long fix - (which I had to do) render two images, one of the boat with rim lighting and one of the boat in the water with no rim lighting. Then slap the rim lit image over the top of the water image in photoshop afterwards.
The quick fix would have saved me time (= money)
I understand and appreciate that vray is more related to ‘real world’ setups, it’s just that some of the images that I have to produce aren’t real world - but look nice.
Rob.
how does it not make sense? My point was that it hurts nothing to be able to include some ‘older’ methods while still keeping the new. I have clients in the arch vis industry ( and I know your arch vis background) that needs things done pretty darn quick, so proper glossy reflections are just out…period. Does that mean I shouldn’t have some sort of specular highlights either? I would hope that you would agree that it would be a mistake to completely remove the ability to use faked specular reflections when the situation calls for it. So if we can agree that there might be times that specular fakes are warranted (whether I agree with them or not) then whats wrong with fleshing out the approach a little bit more to give us more control.
Taking your argument to its logical conclusion, we should all just be using maxwell render, and be done with it, since vray employs alot of ‘fakes’ compared to maxwell.
anyways, im not here to flame either, but its monday, which makes it good for discussions
again, well said Percy
I want to hide in reflections too!
My reason is this:
Clients with bad designs require fake lighting. It is harder to fake it when the fakers are caught in the reflections.
V-Ray is damn fast, but for many of us it’s still not fast enough. When I’m working on an archviz animation, given the complexity of the scenes it’s almost impossible to get low enough render times that also are free of grain and artifacts to make the deadline. I always try to be as real as possible, and I’m having a lot more luck working linearly (less light = faster renders), but I’ll still fake specs on smaller objects where I want the edge highlight but can’t afford the extra reflective bounces and rendertime necessary to prudce a solid image.
Also when I’m doing quick schematic renderings, the ability to fake lets me add a glossy element in a specific place without affecting everything else. As long as it’s clear to the user that this is deviating from the norm, the more flexibility that I have to adjust an image the better.
I think V-Ray does a good job of allowing both. Restricting them to a certain path is only going to frustrate more users. Maybe they’ll learn the right way of doing things a bit faster, but they won’t be thrilled about it.
Shaun
should the fake glossy highlight option also be removed ?
the glossies are not as silky smooth or ‘real’ but they render a load faster and get the point across - it depends on the job requirement
a flexible tool should not impose its methods on the users!
there’s always going to be a big requirement for masssaged realism
First off, let me say that I owe you guys a bit of a apology as I realize now that I come from a different perspective. In the line of work that I come from, realism is the only goal and “cheaper” shortcuts are not an option if you want to be competitive. So things like fake specs, Ambient Occlusion (except for the occasional contact shadow integration), Shadow maps, etc… are not an option. The reason Vray works better than Maxwell (since someone brought it up) is not because it can give you the option to fake things, is because it can give you photorealism much much faster without compromising speed. Granted this is through its adaptive nature as opposed to an unbiased nature, but that is a different argument.
So granted some of you see a need for it, and I should respect it. I see none, but I come from a different perspective.
well said chris 
Now that’s the spirit.
V-Ray is an incredible tool, never has a renderer been so usable for so many of the different 3D sectors. I would hope it remains that way. I dare say that us ArchViz guys did more than our share to support V-Ray through the years being the first to widely adopt V-Ray as the tool of choice. It is very cool to see it maturing and being adopted into more and more high budget fx work and onto the silver screen. In the future there will be no need for any cheats, computational power will be abundant but as it is now us Viz guys need to take a few short cuts. Our studio renders up to 300,000 frames/passes a month we cannot afford even 1 hour render times.
I can’t believe you’ve made such a fuss over this guys Like I said, I was going to add a similar option anyways.
Best regards,
Vlado
heheh, i didnt wanted to start a crisis here 
I just stepped over that issue and was wondering about it, because I thought that I can handle real/faked specs separately in the light UI…
ok, now lets get back to work guys
Lol as percy said, it was a really good monday discussion.
Vlado, make sure the option you’ll add is BLUE :lol:
Lele
hehe chris, I assumed the difference in opinion was due to different requirements. I always strive for the most photoreal I can manage, its the clients that shoot it down. Here’s an example. I’ve been doing interior living spaces for several years now. I can do them in my sleep and they are incredibly boring. So this last project, I decided to try and inject some life into the project by having at least one thing in each room have some movement, instead of very static walkthroughs. Almost everything has basically been shot down. I was so crushed by their lack of vision, that I nearly decided to remove the rest as I didn’t think ‘they’ deserved it. lol
This kind of client, wouldn’t give a hoot about perfect glossy reflections. They would be damn happy if I gave them specular fakes and simple reflections if I could guarantee them it would get it to them faster. But thats not what our shop is about. So we play the balancing act.
And Vlado, I understand where your coming from. I get the feeling you develop vray from a more technical perspective first, and artistic second. I’m assuming alot, so I apologize if I’m incorrect. One thing that differentiates Brazil from Vray, is that with brazil, they, from the very beginning touted their renderer as being artist driven, with their great materials and such. While Vray was frequently first to the market with all the latest technological ‘stuff’, which took brazil quite awhile to implement. Which is the better approach? Who knows, but I haven’t used brazil in years 
I hear you… and thank you for confirming why I left Archviz all those years ago. My clients are constantly pushing what is possible, just because they have to be better than the last movie/commercial.
To Vlado… sorry I turned it into a flame war…
No flaming here! I understand all your points, Chris -- I’ve had to unlearn most of my faking techniques over the past year as both our equipment and V-Ray has gotten faster. I’m often surprised at how fast you can render even when employing a vraylight through refractive materials vs. making a lampshade itself illuminated.
Unfortunately when short lead times in archviz means cutting out most of the compositing and post work you wish you could afford, it often means simplifying the more complicated effects to reduce the number of errors that you don’t see until the job’s been on the farm all weekend.
Shaun
Likewise - I’d ideally work in a situation where everything was done properly to give the best possible quality but unfortunately I’m in a small market where things are (rather stupidly) led by clients and agencies who more often than not don’t have a fucking breeze what they’re talking about. Thus I like having some fall back in case of last minute changes and so on.
We found a nice workaround for this:
hide the light behind black geometry (eg a plane) and set this geometry to cast shadows off and invisible to camera).
The light still does fake highlights but does not reflect in the raytraced reflections.
In my opinion physical correctess is not always good. Nobody would ever want to miss the option to turn “visible to camera” off just because this isn’t physical correct
Best regards
Dieter
nice work around dieter!
this comes handy atm!
..and i double that! i am all for physicall correctness but keep the ability to go around things is mandatory! that s vray to me…all those trendy renderers miss right there…in the ability to chose when and where u want it to be correct or not!
imho
Nice one Dieter! 8) I’ll remember this for the future.