I read Matt saying once that the reflective shader specular output(without ray-traced reflections), is equivalent to the default shader's specular settings. Fine.
Why then, when using a reflective shader, with ray-traced reflections, does the quality tab's 'number of samples' have absolutely NO effect until 'reflection softness' is enabled?
I'd been confused by this in the past but I never linked the sample quality to the softness levels mainly because I'd not used the softness slider before.
So, I made some really shiny things in TG and used very high(5) overall reflectivity on them.
The results are as follows:
Ray traced reflections on a PFS displaced black sphere - sample quality 4(default). = 22 seconds.
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " - sample quality 32(slider's max) = 22 seconds.
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " - sample quality 0 = 22 seconds.
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " - sample quality 1000,000! = you guessed it! Well done.
Tiny adjustments(I'm talking 0.001 - 0.1 ranges here) to the 'reflection softness' make
massive changes in render time when more samples are used. The main question here then is:
Why does the sample level make no difference to the reflection quality/render-time
without soft reflections. Shouldn't the quality tab slider be labeled as
'Number of soft reflection samples' if it only ups the quality when there is an extra softness factor, or a negative one, I tried negative levels of softness(a futile attempt to make 'frosted' type textures) with different sample levels and the render-times still increase considerably, maybe even more so than with positive softness values.
