The best equivalent to shininess?

[mikepan]

hmm, in the world world, specular highlights and ray-mir are tied together. Most of the objects that reflects their environment also has a high specular value.

And the microscopic bumps of the surface controls the hardness of the specular highlight as well as the blurryness of the reflections.

So in essence, those 4 settings (spec, raymir, hardness, raymir-blur(available in Blender 2.45)) is really two settings, and that's exactly how Indigo, an unbiased renderer, interprets the material settings.

Blender gives you the option to tweak each setting individually because it's a biased renderer and doesn't know any better :twisted:

[FreakyDude]

Thank you, that may come in handy. Should make it easier to understand some of the settings in these other apps.
We have this great open material repository, with about a 160 materials. We should keep adding to that, in an organised way though....
What I mean is, we have a number of vague desribed materials such as Metal, or shiny metal, or wood, while we could use a library with things like chrome, or polished aluminium, or red aspen, or english oak, or pinetree etc etc.
Maybe we should make repositories for various such as rigs and light rigs as well.
The guy seems a little disappointed that only so many people come up with new materials, so I want to try and make a few good "real world" ones.

[brkn]

So in essence, those 4 settings (spec, raymir, hardness, raymir-blur(available in Blender 2.45)) is really two settings, and that's exactly how Indigo, an unbiased renderer, interprets the material settings.

Blender gives you the option to tweak each setting individually because it's a biased renderer and doesn't know any better :twisted:

You're 100% right on the meaning of shininess and specularity etc. But to be pedantic (and have a fun little rant :)), this has got nothing to do with being biased or not.

People often confuse the word 'unbiased' with meaning 'physically accurate' or 'simulating light' - it doesn't mean that at all, it pretty much means that it doesn't use tricks to accelerate things such as photon mapping, but works based on randomness to converge to a 'correct' result. But that idea of 'correct' doesn't necessarily mean 'physically correct', it just means that it arrives at the right result that the input formulas dictate. What those formulas actually calculate, and how good they are at it, i.e. spectral light calculus, or caustics, or volumetrics, or whatever, is not really the same thing.

Anyways, it would be very simple for Blender to use single variables for shininess and gloss, the reason it doesn't is pragmatic, to make it easier to have artistic control and speed, rather than forcing a totally physical model.

[mikepan]

You're 100% right on the meaning of shininess and specularity etc. But to be pedantic (and have a fun little rant :)), this has got nothing to do with being biased or not.


Ok, I knew i was going to make a fool out myself by trying to sound like I know more than I really do. Thanks for the correction Matt.

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