[3dtrialpractice]

Hey, I had a great response to the nomad airplane pic. I was gonna do 1 last round of renderchanges based on everyones feedback, AND I'm putting together a tutorial of how this scne was setup, shaders, settings, ets.

But I wanted to be clear that I understood what happened in my scene before posting a tutorial with an error.

(these renders of the airplane are without a color map, just shader test of the spec glossienes and the effect off a map applied to the reflective channel and different bump settings)

my question is with the GLOSSY STRENGTH
why does the glossy increase the SHine of the object only to strenght of 20-30, is this why the default is 25, the "Glossy shiniest setting"
because anything over 30 and higher to 100 actually decrease the Shinieness gleam of this object. I would expect by the behaviour from 1-25 that at 99 glossy strenght the airplain would gleem from glossyness?

clearly its in what i define as glossiness? or what glossy does, i thought it added the light reflected, that the glossy increased the reflective caustics, but i guess the reflective caustics is mainly amplified by spec color?

here is the shader test frames in this .gif and also a jpeg of the glossy frames.

I know there must be some explination can anyone fill me in?





thanks in adv!
-Luke

[Mihai]

The glossyness in Maxwell is simply how rough the reflections look. Glossy=0=perfectly specular reflections.

About using maps:
If you use a refl map, that map will not dictate the strength of the specular reflections, only the placement.

The specular color chip controls the strength of the specular reflections. You can also map it with a b/w map which will let you control both placement and strength via the map (then the settings in the specular color chip won't matter, it takes it's values from the map).

For the glossyness, you can either use the u/v roughness settings for overall blurryness of the reflections, or map it, in which case it will ignore the u/v settings and use the values in the b/w map (whiter=more blur). You can still control the overall influence of the glossy map via the via glossyness strength setting. So for example you can have a 255 white glossymap, but if you leave strength at 0 it will all be just specular reflections, no blur.

To get to your example, it's normal what is happening because up to a point the blurryness of the reflection will still make it look strong and almost wet like on an object, but when you put it at full 100 glossyness then it becomes so blurred, it looks faded.

[3dtrialpractice]

ok great!

that explains it, So by mapping my glossy map with a map, then that turns of fthe UV roughness. And basically a glossy strenght of over 25 blurs the spec so much is looks like is not as shiny. You mention that applying a black wihite map to the spec will control it, but just in addition to black whit you can also input color to that spc channel i understand.

Now the only question I have is what advantage does setting your glossy strenght to over 25, does it increase the reflective caustics?
well I know i can set up a little scene witha plastic reflecting on a wall to find out.
Thanks for clearifying that its the blurriness that decreases the gleam, and also good to know that the glossy map is a mappable version of u/v roughness.
thanks again for the exlpnation!

[Mihai]

Now the only question I have is what advantage does setting your glossy strenght to over 25, does it increase the reflective caustics?

Changing the glossy setting doesn't actually make the surface reflect less or more light, it's just a setting to simulate micro grooves in a surface which makes the light reflect off of it in many different directions, so you get a blurrier reflection of the environment. So I think it wouldn't make stronger caustics, it would just make blurrier caustics, which visually could also mean weaker caustics, you wouldn't see the typical well defined, concentrated caustic patterns.

[3dtrialpractice]

wonderful! this helped me clear this up!
thanks for reply back and helping me sort it out!

great thanks again for keeping up to me with this!
youve been a great help!

-Luke