Quote - Ok, this is a a silver shader I made (on the bracelet edges). it has a 0.5 softness in the reflect node and yet I still get this fully saturated mirror reflection where the bracelet turns toward the center bit with the color. Granted, I'm using the actual IOR of silver, which is 0.18 - just in case that may be causing it as well. FWIW, I tried using 0.99 and I sort of get the same thing ;).

I don't want that hard reflection like that....is there anything I can do to minimize it? If it's by the raybias, how do I figure out what number to put in there?

Thanks a bunch.

Laurie

"Forever Shader Confused"

On small areas like the rim of the bracelet a softness of only 0.5 might be hard to see. Did you try higher values? To get something resembling frosted silver try e.g. 5. Raising the quality helps with the resulting noise.

Although an IOR of 0.18 sounds technically correct, it probably will not work, simply because the fresnel (and refraction) node cannot handle values < 1. An often used alternative is to use a very high IOR of 20 to 40. Or simply leave out the fresnel and use a simple reflection node.

The ray bias has nothing to do with this. You will sometimes get black pixels, mostly at the edge of the object, because the normal of the surface does not match the position of the surface (because of smoothing or displacement), so the reflection thinks it is inside the object and turns black. Raising the ray bias can help with this. Similar to the bias of shadow maps (where a small value can cause stripes on the surface).