House on hill

[Dune]

Something I did for Dorian. He made this truly wonderful house, including its interior (bed, sofa's and all), I added the greenery. Mostly pops on object, because the steep ground is object too. Took quite a bit of fiddling to get the masking right.

[dorianvan]

Turned out great! Thanks again for your help.

[Hannes]

Looks fantastic!!

[WAS]

Great work! Texturing is nice. That's the type of mountain house I'd want.

I think the roughness is far too high for glass, kinda looks like matt plastic windows. Should honestly be able to see crisp reflections of trees and sky (slightly warped by maybe soft perlin roughness) muddling the ability to see inside. During daylight it's pretty hard to see inside buildings through glass. Mainly reflection.

[Dune]

The roughness was set at 0.002. For slightly softer water reflections in the reflective shader (which is also not realistic, but more pleasing to the eye) I usually set it to 0.004. In terms of photorealism it may be a bit too high (maybe zero would be realistic), but artistically seen we're satisfied.

[WAS]

At the same time that seems rather low for such a strong gaussian effect. Strange. I don't think I have had to go so low. It does look mysterious, and nice with the lighting, I have to say, just not Photorealistic.

[Hannes]

As far as I can see, the reflection is OK. The entrance door at the bottom reflects the tree correctly. Maybe not superduper sharp, but to me it looks good.
Maybe some soft shadows in the rooms of the middle part look like blurred reflections?
Wouldn't be the refraction also be blurred if the roughness was too high?

[Dune]

I guess the further objects are away from the glass, the blurrier they get when reflected. And the 'problem' is that there's not really a landscape opposite the house. Just a few trees for reflection sake. I have thought about your remarks, and doing a crop of the house now to see how it looks with zero roughness. I also set refraction to 2, which I have learned gives off crisper reflections. I'll post an update soon (and give the client some choice).

[Hannes]

I guess the further objects are away from the glass, the blurrier they get when reflected

I don't think that reflections that are further away are generally blurrier when reflected. It may depend on the lens. There may be some sort of reflected DOF, but I could be totally wrong.

[Dune]

Room for experimentation. Shadows are blurrier when further away from their source, so my immediate idea was that reflected objects are too, so I didn't ask myself any questions. I usually don't go very deep into physics before doing a render, and tend to use default settings, which may be totally wrong for the purpose.
So far, the new house looks much more realistic.....

[Hannes]

Shadows are blurrier when further away from their source, so my immediate idea was that reflected objects are too, so I didn't ask myself any questions.

So now I can't stop thinking about this....
I'm aware that I have a very limited knowledge of physics. But nevertheless I want to talk about it.
You mentioned shadows. I think the shadow gets blurrier in the distance since the light source emits light in all directions if not limited by some other object. So the farther away the larger the angle, and this is independant from the viewer. The shadow is as it is, no matter where you're standing.
Of course reflections are light information (so to speak) as well. If you just look into the distance and focus it, you'll see everything more or less sharp (unless it's blurred by atmospheric things). There's a straight line between the object you're focusing and your eyes. No angle.

As far as I can tell, you'll see the same way, if you look into a mirror (I know technically speaking mirrors don't have a perfectly even surface, but it's too small to notice with our eyes). So there's DOF as well depending where your focus is, but reflections aren't generally blurred when they are far away.

As far as I know.

And I don't know much...

[Dune]

You are most likely right, Hannes. It's just my 'hurry' in getting work done that I don't think....

Updated with roughness at zero and refraction at 2. This looks more realistic. Thanks again for your remarks, Jordan. The client might like this version better, or perhaps not, but the choice is there.

[Hannes]

Wow, this is quite a difference!!!!! So these blurry parts were indeed reflections. I didn't expect that a roughness of 0.002 would still be that blurry! At least with the path tracer. I think it wouldn't matter with the legac renderer.

[Dune]

Yeah, that's what I thought; 0.002 is already pretty 'nothinglike'. But a higher refraction also seems to get better reflections. I have to do some experimentation with this...
"The index of refraction for glass ranges from as low as 1.44 to as high as 1.95, as glass is created in various ways to be used with different applications such as windows, glass bottles, and safety glass. Each type of glass has a different structure and therefore a different IOR value assigned to it."

[dorianvan]

Nice update and definitely looks better. I noticed the glass before but didn't think the client would so I said nothing as it was "good enough"  before. Artists can always make things better right? The trick is when to stop.