Reflective Shader vs Default / Specular

[RichTwo]

I am working on a project with a snow / ice surface layer on which I connected the Reflective Shader.  The render was still not complete after over 17 hours.  I paused it, and started over with the same .tgd, but plugged the Default shader and added Specular highlights, expecting to have no effect on render time.  In less than 2 hours, the render was complete.  So the results seem to be the same between the two, but render times (and I've seen it before) with Reflective is vastly longer.  Is this a known issue?  Or does Reflective produce a quality that requires a long render?

[WAS]

I am working on a project with a snow / ice surface layer on which I connected the Reflective Shader.  The render was still not complete after over 17 hours.  I paused it, and started over with the same .tgd, but plugged the Default shader and added Specular highlights, expecting to have no effect on render time.  In less than 2 hours, the render was complete.  So the results seem to be the same between the two, but render times (and I've seen it before) with Reflective is vastly longer.  Is this a known issue?  Or does Reflective produce a quality that requires a long render?

Default Shader is not ray traced reflections. If you uncheck Ray traced reflections in the Reflective Shader, you'll get drastically faster renders. Ray traced reflections handle actual reflections from the world around it (limited by the crop region).

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Reflective_Shader

[RichTwo]

I am working on a project with a snow / ice surface layer on which I connected the Reflective Shader.  The render was still not complete after over 17 hours.  I paused it, and started over with the same .tgd, but plugged the Default shader and added Specular highlights, expecting to have no effect on render time.  In less than 2 hours, the render was complete.  So the results seem to be the same between the two, but render times (and I've seen it before) with Reflective is vastly longer.  Is this a known issue?  Or does Reflective produce a quality that requires a long render?

Default Shader is not ray traced reflections. If you uncheck Ray traced reflections in the Reflective Shader, you'll get drastically faster renders. Ray traced reflections handle actual reflections from the world around it.

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Reflective_Shader



A-ha!  Simple as that.  Generally I pay no attention what boxes are checked on a node, assuming they are set for optimal results.  Thanks, Jordan!