bagginsbill opened this issue on Apr 23, 2008 · 2832 posts
bagginsbill posted Thu, 21 May 2009 at 9:36 AM
OK I see where you're going. You plan to place some specular-only lights in key places that correspond with bright areas of the environment. You use a blurred copy of the environment image to generate soft specular reflections, but you don't want them to trigger if something is in the way. That makes sense.
The way you did it has problems, though. First you have no respect in there for the Fresnel effect. The amount of reflection should be modulated by the viewing angle. Use a Blinn node instead, because it will do the right thing.
Second, this seems to be a GC shader, but you did not include the soft specular in the GC, which will make its relative intensity completely dependent on the color of the object. Instead, you should take the Sum of (Diffuse + Blinn + SoftBlinn(Sphere_Map)) into your final GC Pow node. That means inserting another Color_Math:Add and connecting the existing Diffuse+Blinn to the SoftBlinn(Sphere_Map).
By SoftBlinn, I mean another Blinn node with very soft and wide specular effect. You don't need to set up a separate multiply to combine this with the Sphere_Map. Just plug the Sphere_Map into the Specular_Color of this Blinn node. That is multiplying the input with the specular effect.
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