[Sheik]

I noticed the plastic becomes too glossy when rendered from su2mxs. I compared by rendering the scene from Max using the same material, camera & environment settings. (The camara position is not totally identical, but that should be the only difference). The material is beige plastic with 0,5 uv roughness. In Max I used the same colour for specular, but that cant be set in su2mxs, or can it?
Why is there a difference in the images?

Sheik

ps. If you were wondering, this is a statue of Pavol to thank him for his work on su2mxs… if we get a materials library, some UI enhancements and all bugs sorted out I will render it in gold!

[Jake256]

I have also noticed this issue. Almost a pearl like surface.

[Sheik]

I read a tutorial on reflectance of plastics; witch gave me a better understanding on what the specular colour does. http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4585
I am guessing the plugin automatically makes the specular colour a bit brighter than the main colour set to the material. This would be the typical case in other rendering applications, but won’t work in Maxwell. We need to be able to set specular colour to be able to adjust the reflectivity.
Sheik

[Sheik]

It is actually only light colours that are too glossy. Here is an example that shows what happens when specular colour is linked to the main colour: White becomes a “perfect mirror” and Black becomes a “Black Hole”.

Sheik

[pelias]

I am guessing the plugin automatically makes the specular colour a bit brighter than the main colour set to the material. This would be the typical case in other rendering applications, but won’t work in Maxwell. We need to be able to set specular colour to be able to adjust the reflectivity.
Sheik

Very good guess The problem here is how to integrate a color picker into Ruby based dialog for plastic material. In the worst case I can expose RGB fields of the color directly but that is not a very good solution...

Pavol

[Sheik]

I think one solution would be to ad a shininess slider to the plastic material. That setting would affect the lightness (of the same colour in HLS mode) of the specular colour.

Setting should probably stay between 20-80 for natural results.
The result of the different ”shininess” settings for plastic from above would look like this (L 20,50,80);

Why would we actually need to set the specular colour separately as a totally different colour?


Sheik