Resolution of reflected Terrain

[macrix]

Hey there,

I've got a problem concerning the reflective shader. The whole terrain in direct view is quite smooth.
I placed a sphere object in the image with a reflective shader on it.

The overall reflection ist good, but the reflected terrain has a really bad resolution. It looks too rasterized.

Any ideas?

[TheBlackHole]

Maybe it would help to turn off Ray Trace Objects.

[macrix]

Thanks for advice.
Do you mean the "Ray traced reflections" in the Reflective shader?
If I deactivate them, I habe no terrain at all in my sphere.

Meant something else?

[Henry Blewer]

Ray traced objects is set in the render tab.

Try increasing the quality samples of the reflective shader. The highest setting available via the slider may not be enough. You can type in higher values.

[dandelO]

You seem to be rendering reflections of terrain that is beneath water. Read on.

For speed, reflection detail is rendered at 1/4 detail of your main render detail setting. Likewise, underwater surfaces are also rendered at 1/4 detail. Rendering subsurface terrain, reflected on another surface will in turn render with very much reduced detail in the reflections.

Ray traced objects makes no difference to this.

Your only way around this at the moment is to raise your final 'render detail' setting.

* The sample quality of a reflective shader *only* has any impact when you introduce a value of 'reflection softness'. You'll find that setting on the main tab of the reflective shader. There's no difference between using 1 sample and 1024 samples(say), either in detail or render speed, if there is no reflection softness in the main shader's settings.

[dandelO]

I wouldn't advise using 'reflection softness' for much either. It's extremely erratic and rarely renders with good results. Adding lots and lots of samples, you'd imagine, would clean the soft reflections up quite a bit but I have tried adding double the amount of the sample slider's limits and still there are horrible stepping artefacts in the rendered result.

I made a kind of soft reflection shader that you can download from here; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11326.0

You'll find a link to the download at the end of the first page of that thread.

[Tangled-Universe]

Can you post the .tgd file here? There are a couple of things I'd like to try

Cheers,
Martin

[Henry Blewer]

Maybe using a water shader would work better? Just get rid of the transparency...

[macrix]

Hey there,

thanks for advice.

What I've tried is to manually increase the number of samples of the reflective shader to 192. No change of the resolution.
Deactivating ray traced objects is not possible in the version I use (2.0.3.1). Perhaps an update would fix the problem.

I attached the tgd.

[TheBlackHole]

2.0.3.1,

[Oshyan]

This is a limitation of the current raytracer. There will be a control for raytraced terrain detail (separate from the main Detail control) in a future release. Until then increasing main Detail is the only way to address it without changing the scene itself (e.g. softening reflection, adding displacement to the sphere, etc.).

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

There will be a control for raytraced terrain detail (separate from the main Detail control) in a future release.

That's a great piece of news!