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"

This is the material. I left the raybias at the default cause I have no idea what to do with it. LOL.

Laurie

It's unrelated, but your fresnel_blend does nothing. It blends between white and white.

Thanks I'll do it over.

Ok, fixed the fresnel blend. It looks exactly the same and I still have the same problem ;)

Laurie

it's not good shader tree IMVHO; bill mentioned that reflect channel calculates things wrong in PP2012. however, please post link to your source for metals IOR, as I thought it was higher, e.g. 30 or 40.  never lower than 1.0000000000..... (vacuum) AFAIK.

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).

softness can be pushed up to about 4 before it getts all wakky. reflect quality will affect the softness. both of these are using just a reflect node plugged into the reflect  color on the main section. first one is quality=1 soft=1. the second is quality=1 soft=4

Well, this is what I finally got for gold. I think it's respectable. I took all advice into consideration. Now for the silver....

The one bracelet is brushed. I have a teensy tiny amount of turbulence on it, and tho I know its noisy, it's also kinda glittery. I like it. LOL

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Laurie

with that turbulence node you might also be able to turn down the quality setting on the reflect node to speed up render. I default to quality at   .1 unless I'v got softness crancked up.

those look good IMVHO!  for more glister in gold, it needs lotta small surface detail that can have multiple reflections bouncing off adjoining facets.  either more geometry in PP2012 or more displacement in PP2014.

 

above example where it glisters due to geom. interactions.