Environment reflections?
I modeled a revolver and I'm trying to get some environment reflections on it. How do I do this? The only way I can think of to get more reflections is to turn up the spec and the gloss and make the albedo darker, basically turning it into a mirror. Is there a way to get more reflection from the environment without screwing the materials? Thank you.
Replies
Specular and reflections are not separate material properties like they may be in old school shaders, in a physically based rendering pipeline, and in reality, there is only specular reflections (one concept) aka reflectivity, how much light an object reflects. Reflection intensity is driven by your specular content and applied to ambient image based (aka environment cubemap) and direct lighting equally.
The gloss map controls how smooth the surface is, the smoother the surface, the tighter and more intense the highlight will appear.
To get more accurate reflections, you can turn on local reflections in the render tab. This will enable screen space reflections, which are not perfect (they rely on screen space data, so they can't reflect occluded or off screen information), however they provide inter-object reflections which generally helps a great deal with metals or other highly reflective surfaces.
Darkening the diffuse and brightening the specular is the appropriate way to make an object more reflective. Typically, pure metals reflect in the 70-100% range, while the diffuse contribution is near 0%. Coated or painted metals are much less reflective, closer to the 4% range that nearly all non-metals (insulators) fall into.
More info on pbr and material properties here:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-conversion
I hope this helps. If you can post an image of what you're working on, along with a reference image for what you're trying to achieve I may be able to provide further advice.