Sun Highlight Spread for Underwater Surface

Started by WAS, December 16, 2019, 01:45:19 PM

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WAS

Does anyone know a way to spread the suns highlights when doing a underwater surface? The roughness doesn't seem to be helping me and I still get the hard circular white highlights in a tight cluster.

This preview has a roughness of 5, and a highlight intensity of 0.5 and still way to hard and spread doesn't seem effected.

When I look at underwater surfaces, and even above water surfaces with similar sun angles, the spread seem to be huge, but in TG it's always very tight. Similar to doing sunsets along the horizon, TG doesn't want to give you a good spread from the overall glow in the atmosphere, but just the needle-point from the sun itself, which is evident IRL but there is much larger spread and falloff. I've battled this for years.

Only way I can get softer falloff on the highlights is atmospheric bloom, coupled with the water volume (cloud haze), but balancing it between water noise and a nice bloom for the highlights is hard., and doesn't solve my spread issue.

Hannes

Have you tried the path tracer? In PT reflections are treated a little different, and as far as I found out, it's easier to get blurred reflections here, and highlights are just reflections of bright lightsources.

WAS

Quote from: Hannes on December 17, 2019, 02:26:31 AMHave you tried the path tracer? In PT reflections are treated a little different, and as far as I found out, it's easier to get blurred reflections here, and highlights are just reflections of bright lightsources.
That actually didn't even come to mind. I'll give it a try. I did a super high resolution pass and it does look better with I guess more polygons to work with but not what I want.