I love the affect of rendering with just light emitters (no lights)

but it kills gloss such as lip gloss. Is there a way to counteract or prevent this.

PP2012 SR2.1  SSS-IDL

Specular only lights?

Are there surroundings visible to be reflected? 

No, I had'nt thought of that

one may be able to get useful results in this case with the reflection node attached to fresnel node and/or indirect diffuse node, depending on what surface is used and how one wants it to appear.  try snarlygribbly's ezmetals or bagginsbill's metal or paint procedurals.  search the forum using those two usernames and "glossy", e.g.

if it's human skin, I don't think of skin as glossy.  there may be some other term, e.g. sweaty or shiny, but those may be direct specular in older procedurals.

Reflect node is key here. Whether you call it glossy (little blur) or not is immaterial.

I have not entirely abandoned lights, as they have their uses still. So I make materials now that do matched response to lights (via Blinn) and to object (via Reflect).

This has been very tedious work but it is paying off. I can interchange a point light with a small glowing sphere and get similar output from shaders that can "see" either.

Thankyou all for your input

Chris

I have been working on a new version of BBGlossy, BBGlossy2, this time for the market. It's super difficult to match everything. I am still experimenting for weeks.

Here are two copies of the BBGlossy2 shader, one in Mild Gloss, one in Super Gloss.

This is lit with a point light, which you cannot see, obviously, because that's how lights work in Poser.

Now lit with a sphere emitter. The emitter is centered on the same spot as the point light. But, obviously, it's a lot bigger.

(Hehehe. This is hard to understand - point lights are infinitesimal points. They have a size of 0 in any measurement system.)

Tiny emitters work very poorly in Poser. Point lights are still useful.

What we need to do is make sure that the shaders are tuned to do the same regardless of which we choose.

For those of you with an interest in the details and the math, I have not made a perfect match, but I'm closer than I used to be on how to match the Reflect node's softness (blur) with the Blinn node.

Here is what I'm using for a better Blinn (BBlinn)

def BBlinn(blur, maxValue=40, color=WHITE):  

     return Blinn(color, .03 + .065 * blur, 1, maxValue * (.5 ** blur))

Thank you very much, I'll try that!

if a large diffuse emitter, as above (no poser lights), then default reflection node may be enough to make it look glossy.  however, as bill said, treatment of small diffuse emitter is non-trivial, as reflection may need to be soft where the incoming rays are from bright emitters, but default everywhere else.  I tried adding a diffuse node to reflection softness, but it didn't work. it might be that small diffuse emitter's input has to be converted to something else before attaching it to reflection softness channel.

Thanks, nice looking render of the car! Good reflections- looks like 8:00 pm on a summer evening

ID has the same issue of killing off surface specualrity, which I generally try to fix by adding a specular light to the scene. It isn't really a light as such, because it has no effect on the "brightness" of your render, but only creates highlights.

Beware setting the light to too high a value or you'll end up with a shiny mess. I often have strength set to <10% to just bring out skin highlights. Like Brylcreem — "A Little Dab'll Do Ya!"