Specular Only?

[WAS]

Is there a way to just have specular only in a scene? From my understanding of a few sources specular is much easier to compute than other aspects of reflections, and when it comes to natural formations like rock, at a distance, we could get away with specular only faking wet surfaces where a ray traced reflection isn't needed and only would waste resources.

This would substantially save on render times and for things like leaves, stones, moss/whatever in landscape scenes, would give the same impression to the end-viewers.

[Hannes]

If you use a reflective shader and uncheck "ray traced reflections" you'll have specular only. But this only works with the standard renderer. The path tracer uses ray traced reflections by default, no matter if you uncheck it or not.

[WAS]

Isn't there a diffuse type effect with specular on top of that? For example, if you you ramp up the index of refraction so you can see the effect better, there is a lot of ambient light capturing around the specular spread, and in shadows.

So what if you just want that white highlight specular effect?

[Hannes]

Ah yes, now I remember Matt (or Oshyan) saying, there is some sort of rough approximation of raytraced reflections left, but anyway it should be much faster than real ray traced reflections.
As far as I know, there's no other way to get highlights only.

[WAS]

Yeah it is definitely faster, but in PT that doesn't matter and it's just dog-awfully slow for doing wet stuff because it is ray traced (or true reflections). A specular only effect like they used to use in old 3D (like T-rex in JP in rain) would save so much time on rendering and in darker lit scenarios or at a distance would give the same impression of a reflective surface. Even in Standard Renderer a specular only shader would be much faster than current version with diffusion reflection or whatever.