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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 10:11:01 AM

Title: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 10:11:01 AM
A new idea from me again :)

Instead of using the reflection on for example the leafs on trees we could have a "highlight" or "glossyness" option in the shaders. This is something that will only make the parts where the sun is supposed to be reflected, brighter with a chosen color. It would be a lot faster I guess and on a population of trees we would probably not see any difference.

Regards,
Terje
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: Cyber-Angel on September 23, 2009, 10:16:45 AM
The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight.  ;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: Tangled-Universe on September 23, 2009, 11:11:58 AM
Quote from: Cyber-Angel on September 23, 2009, 10:16:45 AM
The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight.  ;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

Exactly, I thought that too.
You can choose the reflective color, so that should be no problem.

Martin
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 11:35:51 AM
Quote from: Cyber-Angel on September 23, 2009, 10:16:45 AM
The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight.  ;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

Alright.... specular highlight it is ;)

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on September 23, 2009, 11:11:58 AM
Quote from: Cyber-Angel on September 23, 2009, 10:16:45 AM
The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight.  ;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

Exactly, I thought that too.
You can choose the reflective color, so that should be no problem.

Martin

Are you talking about using the "reflective shader" or something else?

Regards,
Terje
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: Tangled-Universe on September 23, 2009, 02:30:29 PM
Reflective shader and default shader have a setting called "reflection tint", this is where you can choose your color.
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 04:09:30 PM
Yes, but this still is reflections and that makes it slow.
I want an option for only specular highlight. Much faster :P

Regards,
Terje
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: Tangled-Universe on September 23, 2009, 04:13:53 PM
Quote from: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 04:09:30 PM
Yes, but this still is reflections and that makes it slow.
I want an option for only specular highlight. Much faster :P

Regards,
Terje

This IS about specular highlights.

In the specular tab (hence, the name?) of the default shader you find functions which mention reflectivity but they ARE specular highlights.

In the reflection shader (again, the name) you can create real reflections (raytraced). However, if you disable the raytracing of these reflections you will end up with the exact same function as in the default shader.
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 04:20:48 PM
So if I turn off "Ray traced reflections" it will become exactly what I'm asking for??
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: Matt on September 23, 2009, 05:13:58 PM
If you disable ray traced reflections in the Reflective Shader, you get specular highlights which take very little time to compute. Even so, it still "cheats" overall reflectivity of the rest of the environment by using a fast lookup of the environment stored in the GI cache, so you can't render just highlights without any other reflectivity, but to be frank I woudn't like to let you do that anyway ;) Disabling ray traced reflections gives you fast specular highlights and a fast approximation to the general ambiance of other reflections, depending on the GI settings.

The reflective (specular) settings in the Default Shader do the same thing as the Reflective Shader with ray traced reflections disabled.

Matt
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: Tangled-Universe on September 23, 2009, 05:20:00 PM
That's what I meant to say/explain.
As usual Matt puts it in better words than me :)
Title: Re: Feature Request: Highlight Effect
Post by: sjefen on September 23, 2009, 05:21:34 PM
Quote from: Matt on September 23, 2009, 05:13:58 PM
The reflective (specular) settings in the Default Shader do the same thing as the Reflective Shader with ray traced reflections disabled.

Alright Matt. I looked, but did not find it in the Default shader :)

Well..... no need for my request after all :). I did not now this was the case. Thanks for the info guys.

Regards,
Terje