Missing reflection intensity control (my most important material problem) and a practicable solution

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  • Hi,


    in the next time I will start my first large commercial project per Enscape for Rhino, an airport interior. I know that Enscape for Rhino is a limited beta, but in the last weeks I learned to workaround shortcomings and to live with exist features. Only I'm nervous about one thing - the missing control over the reflection intensity. We talked about it .. and I have a new idea how to solve it.


    First, the reflection intensity slider could be activated without to support the color. For example my airport needs dark tiles and they are much to reflective.


    My new idea is to use the Rhino environment texture slot for reflection intensity control by textures. For architecture it's an important basic feature, tile floors or bath tiles can't be nice mapped without it. Mortar gaps and tile needs different reflection intensities.

    The Rhino Environment texture slot is build in for using different environments maps (f.ex. mirror ball panos) to fake different materials at the viewport, for example a blurry map for faking blurry metal. Here a visual explanation. I suppose so this kind of fake will not be supported by Enscape within a reasonable time frame.


    So, we have an unused texture slot and we miss one, McNeel will not add a new texture slot within a reasonable time frame and the Rhino Environment map fake is something for faking types of Reflections. So, please connect the Environment texture slot with the reflection intensity. And best at the next preview version so that I could use it for my project that starts soon. ;)


    -Micha

  • Thanks for your idea. Try increasing the roughness to lower the reflection amount.

    It is unlikely that we will implement it as you suggested because we intend to deliver maximum coherence and realism which is easily destroyed by such hacks. We would have to to label certain parameters as "not realistic, could look good from one angle but may worse your image from another" - which we do not want. Anyway, we will try to find other ways to solve that.

  • Strange, I use Vray since more than 10 years and my clients are happy and come back over years. I don't need any advertisement for my work. So, it can't be so bad that I had control over the reflection intensity. And if I need less reflection than I can't deliver a stronger roughness. Are you sure that all other render engines are supporting a wrong parameter? (I know Vray, Octane, AIR, Maxwell, Rhino renderer)


    And I'm curious how can I get the tiles with non reflective mortar? I was so happy to find a solution. :(


    For example the great high quality textures from Arroway.de needs a reflection control by mapping. Fantastic textures for design and architecture. Not for Enscape?


    And we shouldn't forget - if some one doesn't like to adjust the reflection intensity, than he could ignore the parameter.

  • I'm also going to voice concern about Enscape not providing controls to manage material reflection properties. I had my principle reviewing a project I was working on where he mentioned his distaste of the chrome like appearance of the metals in the scene. As a designer I really appreciate the ease of producing quality images quickly with Enscape but its hard to explain to someone with little knowledge of the rendering software why I can't control something as simple as reflection properties. If I have to continue to use Vray for producing inhouse reviews it'll be difficult to warrant the use of Enscape in the office. Let me know if you have any other solutions / hacks for this.

  • +1 on the reflection limitations. Especially the connection between reflection and glossiness. Those two should really be two parameters.


    We want to have sharp but faint reflections.

  • Sorry to bump an old thread if this has been addressed elsewhere, but I was also looking for reflection intensity control and couldn't find it anywhere.

    I understand the goal of realism, and if it is impossible to have both ray traced reflections AND a reflection intensity slider, than sure I'll take the realism over 'hacks'. (There may also be higher priorities than such a slider and limited time, and that's of course fine!). But to not put an intensity slider out of principal for physical accuracy is misguided, I think. The fact is that rendering is not about making a real image, it's typically about selling a product by telling a story which may or may not want a certain type of reflection.

    For what it's worth, I'll also add that the human eye perceives thing much differently than a camera. Trying to produce a physically correct image can sometime result in a perceptually less-correct image. As an example directly related to reflections, I'm looking at a building across the street through the windows of my office. The reflections of the office lights are actually quite bright. But I don't perceive them as bright in the reflection because my eyes are focused on the building across the street, and the different focal point reduces the impact of the closer lights. I also don't perceive them as blurred, though. The most appropriate depiction of the real-life experience of what it's like to work in this space would be a faint-but-sharp reflection, not a physically accurate render.