Over the last couple of nights I've been trying to create some anisotropic reflective surfaces procedurally. Getting somewhere now.
These test images are of the old version I was throwing around, they're rough and have no real consistency in their scales.(I was using a Perlin noise driven by sin scalars so, the patterns were random).
I've now got a nice uniform brushed-grain distribution, by losing the Perlin and simply squaring the sin function. More images of that to follow, these are old ones.
Just some early proof of concept shots.
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A couple of nasty ones where I've been trying to conform to the spherical surfaces;
(The specular roughness was too low on my spheres so, I picked up a few too many blooms here)
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You can see the reflections are being scattered instead of the hard edged default settings. Before someone says; "Why not just use the 'reflection softness' parameter to blur the reflections?" Well, that's not really the same thing. And also, I have no patience to waste on that area since, at final render detail of '1' and max' reflection samples, you'll get a lovely output like this(I couldn't be bothered to let it finish);
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The more clued up of you will know that final reflectivity is extremely optimised(I think it's optimised to much the same degree as water transparency - Render detail = '1'/Reflection detail = 0.25, this will probably be where the nasty reflection softness 'bug' comes from so, for full quality soft reflection to work you'd need a final render detail of '4').
All of these images were rendered at detail '1', and while that's still only 1/4 final reflective detail, I'm not facing too much pain in the arse at that. I will say that rendering these at detail '2' takes 4 times as long so, I'm trying to find a nice balance of scales/noise/speed but still with acceptable results.
The spheres could do with a bit of work but I think I've just about got it quite close on a flat planar surface.
Updates to follow...