A more relastic floor - I'm (re-)learning the material room, and looking for a reasonable/moderately realsitic scene to do some material tests in.

Thanks for all of your help.  I know I'll be back with more questions once I play more.

Quote - Because the ks_microfacet does not implement the correct Fresnel effect. It has some variance based on viewing angle but does not expose a control allowing us to adjust that. The correct relationship between angle and reflection is calculated by the Fresnel_Blend node. Plugging it into the specular color is modulating it with a multiplication. When FB is low, the specularity is reduced.

Ok - that makes sense.  I was playing with the Ks thinking that would do the modulation, but that didn't work well.

Quote - Note that this Andy shader has 100% scatter and 20% diffuse as well. This is 120% reflection and is why it blows up in bright light. I'd just set Diffuse_Value = 0 and be done with it. The Scatter is handling diffuse reflections all by itself.

I had missed that the first couple of times I looked because of the Scatter plugged into the Alternate Diffuse.

For grins and giggles, let's say I wanted to have 80% Scatter and 20% Diffuse (don't know why - but I'm going to go play with it after while just to see what happens) I could just use a Math:Add node with Value_1 as the Scatter at .8 and Value_2 as a Diffuse Node at .2, right?  Or do I need a Color Math node for this (it's been a while)?

Thanks!  I think it's looking better.  You caught the floor problems (that was going to be my next question).  I'll post the floor shader next in case someone needs the picture.  I'm still not 100% happy with the floor, I want the black tiles to be darker, but I think that's my color choice for the walls combined with the fact that in the real world we would probably see the floor as black and white even though it is really dark/light grey because of the reflections.

You also caught another problem over in the Wax thread - I did not have the attenuation set properly on my point lights.  That's fixed and they are at 80% each.  According to the light meter I'm good, but I think Andy's chest is a little hot.  I"m using the default shader for him except I changed the Scatter material to Cream.  I'll post that shader with my questions in a minute or so.

(Image was cropped to get it down to the size limit).

Quote - And now with smoothing on. Voila - edges that are not straight.

OK, I'm with you 100%.  Now would you change the material to be reflective?  Doesn't need to be fancy for this.  I'm curious if the reflective surface follows the smoothed surface or the "actual" surface.

Thanks.

I'm attaching the triangulated original wall to this post and I'll attach the 2x smoothed one to the next post.

I've fixed the artifact problem by getting rid of the multiple thin polygons at the top and bottom of the wall.

I'm still seeing the horizontal edges in the wall however.

Oh yea - I forgot to mention, this is with Poser Pro 2010 (8.0.3.11916) running on Win 7 64 bit.

The disk is similar - the IOR is much lower and the diffuse color is a different.

I mentioned this in another thread yesterday - SVDL has a Python script that will let you adjust the texture filter settings on all materials at once.  I don't remember where I found it - either here or over at RDNA.