I now work on a Winter scene. Snow, obviously, being a key feature in the entire landscape.
I try to mimic the "glitter" effect that comes about, when the sunshine is cast upon snow and individual snowflakes reflect some of the light. I have created a colourless fake stone shader, very tiny stone size, to account for the delicate snowcap irregularities. Then, I applied a reflective shader to it.
This, however, is as far as I can go because I encounter the following problems:
1. At ceratin points, the reflection applied looks very moist... as if it was wet, not reflective.
2. Flares - in certain image areas, the reflections clump together, causing the renderer to "average" them into a one big flare-up (a possible contributing factor - the terrain is gently displaced; it's not a flat, uniform plane).
I'm sure that one part of the problem lies within the reflective shader settings. Something that I used many times but never analyzed in depth. Do you have any idea how one could achieve a "dry" reflection?
As far as the flares are concerned I have no idea how I can circumvent such an artifact. Changing pixel filter is the only option I can think of right now.