Reflections & Mirror Rendering

[trashcan]

I wrote this up and put in the wrong forum, can an admin move it to the rendering forum?

 

Experimenting with reflectivity. Was trying to find some answers on this but just figuring it out myself and posting my results for the next person who has similar questions. 

 

I have a room with three columns in it. The room's walls and ceiling are mirrors. I am experimenting with textures to get the best reflections. 

 

These quick renders are in the design layer and I turned off one of the walls to make it easier to see inside. 

 

The PURE mirror texture:

Color shader is solid black -

 

 

That doesn't look quite right because we should see some sort of sheen on the surface of the glass. 

 

After some experimenting, using Reflectivity-->Metallic and having some roughness give the surface some sheen. This still isn't quite right so looking for a better material choice here? 

 

 

The SILVER texture (fast quality):

 

Custom renderworks:

 

Settings:

 

Closing up the box, still using custom renderworks, adding ambient occlusion and increasing the max reflect to 5.

 

Cool, cool, cool

 

 

[trashcan]

I forgot how convoluted this process is lolol. But putting it up here in case someone else is trying to figure this out. 

 

Now playing with aperture and even with high quality it looks pretty nasty for stuff out of focus:

 

Vs. Low quality, no aperture:

 

So the camera effects are definitely working. When I open ip to f/1 the background is even more out of focus.

 

But what's up with the noise on the glass, that only occurs when I turn on aperture... I wonder... 🤔

 

Could it be the texture? I don't think so because the renderworks settings are the same except the aperture setting being on... What about turning on Textures-->Blurriness:

 

I understand why the grain is here (low-quality render) but where'd the reflections go!?

Ok let's do an override of the mirror texture here and see what happens. Maybe add reflection to the clear coat? 

 

That didn't change anything either... hmmm.

 

Turning the roughness off brought the reflections back and the grain is behaving properly. Let's see about turning the aperture back on to f/1:

Huh. Could it have something to do with mirror bounce? Turned off all the walls except the one behind the columns:

 

Could it have something to do with the properties of the mirror? Here's I've duplicated my columns and put them behind the main columns instead of reflecting them:

 

The grain is only in the things out of focus. so the background isn't effected, so it's less noticeable. Let me put a solid in there:

 

 

Wow that looks correct. So it's the way that Vectorworks handles reflective surfaces plus aperture camera effects. I'd love to use both aperture camera effects and reflections... 

 

Turning on anti-aliasing helps with the general noise, but that aperture noise is still there.

 

Turning up all the settings to very high solves it. Should've led with that:

 

It just takes 100x as long. That's as far into the render as I was willing to go (40 minutes).

 

Ok, let's figure out which setting specifically improves the aperture blur:

 

That looks pretty good, but still some noise in the highlights:

 

Anti-alias high:, all else medium:

 

Anti alias VERY high, all else medium:

 

 

Still a little noise in the highlights. Turning up blurriness quality to very high (it's on as render setting) changes were perceptually mild and the render took 5 minutes instead of a minute. So that doesn't seem to be the offender. 

 

Have gone through one at a time to figure out who the offender is and haven't found anything. 

 

No idea what tricks to try next. 

 

First one to figure out what's on the pedestals gets a prize.

 

I'm also curious why the difference between HIGH and VERY HIGH is so significant on impacting rendering times - specifically for anti-aliasing. I wish there was a slider so I could pick the quality. There's got to be something between the two that doesn't take so long to render. 

 

 

 

Edited November 21, 2021 by trashcan

[Benson Shaw]

Wow, @trashcan ! Many thanks for testing and showing all the steps with commentary.
-B 

[trashcan]

My pleasure. There are so many mysteries to VWX and hard to find answers so happy to share.