Quote - > Quote -  It is VERY important to remember that almost nothing you encounter is going to have an IOR much higher than ~1.5, which would map to a spec color of about 55 in Reality. Going much higher tends to make things bizziarely semi-mettalic.

J, is that relegated to just the specular, or the top coat as well?

With specular, I do keep mine well under 50 in most cases, especially on skin. 

The top coat, on the other hand, I will stick to my numbers! Five of these characters have crazy values for top coats and, I think, look decent.

Nope, top coat is the absoprtion parameters, those are completely unrelated. Those ones you can set with the classic "pick a color and eyeball it" method.

 

=====Nerd info time=====

 

Lux's glossy material (and its cousin glossytranslucent) is made up of two parts: a matte base reflector (essentially just the matte material) and a glassy glaze-coating. There are 4 main properties: diffuse color, which is the albedo of the base; specular color, which is index of refraction of the glaze; absorption color, the amount of light lost passing through the glaze to the base; and roughness, how smooth or (microscopically) rough the glaze is.

 

Now, the glaze is a glassy substance (technically it's a dielectric, but that term is almost-synonymous with "glass" when talking about shader config). That means it has an IOR. And that it exhibits the fresnel effect. That means that an incoming light ray can either be reflected like a mirror (specular reflection) or passed through the coat. In the event of the latter, the absorption settings (aka, the top coat in Reality) will determine how much darker the ray will be once it makes it down to the matte base. Whether a ray is transmitted or reflected depends on something called the "angle of incidence". Shallower angles (such as viewing directly) allow the ray to pass through. Grazing angles cause a reflection. The higher your IOR, the more reflection you get at increasingly shallow angles

 

Thus: When you increase your specular color, not only do you make your highlights and reflections brighter (and remember, spec highlights are merely reflections of light sources), you make them disproportionately stronger when viewed head-on. And on top of that, you will blunt the effect of the top coat, since that only deals with light that is NOT reflected by the coat.

 

Make sense?