When rendering glossy materials, if you are using environment blur and setting the max distance (on the mia_Architural material) to a suitable value, is it worth using Ambient Occlusion ‘reflect’ option or does this pretty much do the same thing? Also what would you connect to the AOs’ ‘Light’ texture slot to match the env_blur used in the rest of the scene?
Thanks
Hi!
I guess reflection occlusion is probably faster than extremely glossy reflections so it may well be worth it if you can use low occlusion samples, like 4 samples with good Unified Sampling settings. I don’t know how your scene is set up, but could you just hook the env_blur into the ‘Light’ texture slot in addition to wherever it’s currently being used?
I don’t have a lot of experience using env_blur and reflection occlusion, so I’m actually wondering what will go in the ‘Dark’ texture slot! 
Within the Max Distance you’ll get raytraced glossy reflections of objects, then outside the Max Distance you’ll get the reflection occlusion shader results which will either be the env_blur result or if it hits an object… blackness?
Maybe the reflection occlusion isn’t helpful here after all. :surprised