well, pbr enables reflected light sources automatically. but how to do this manually for the micropoly and/or raytrace engine?

either nobody knows/understands what i mean or nobody wants to help actually.
in both ways .. let me know.

In the older render engines that's called specular

eetu.

thx for the reply but i'm not exactly sure if you really know what i mean. i'm actually talking about reflections and nothing else. to visualize this i rendered a simple example ( a sphere with a grid shaped area light ) in all 3 engines. the material is the pre-built reflective material that comes with houdini; specular completely disabled - reflections enabled.

http://i26.tinypic.com/28shgz.png [i26.tinypic.com]

as you can see the grid shaped area light is reflected in the pbr render. and this feature is enabled automatically by the pbr. ( documentation says: “PBR automatically enables: …, and reflected light sources.” ).

and now my question again: how to enable this manually for the micropoly and/or raytrace engine?

maybe it's not possible at all for micropoly/raytrace .. but what if i want to disable it for pbr? .. so i guess somewhere is this option and i'm unable to figure it out.

thx in advance again. =]

good point… i never really noticed this before.

anyone know what exactly PBR is doing to reflect lights?

My guess is PBR supports true geometry based area-lights and all other contexts do not.

To reproduce it you use constant shaded geometry placed where your light is.

For the non-pbr engines, you need to add an actual piece of geometry to reflect. This is standard practice with all traditional renderers/engines (not just Mantra) – at least in my experience.
See attached.

thanks mario,

was hoping there might be some secret hidden parameter

it might be nice for future releases to get more of these options built into lights…

check out:
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/light_params.htm [spot3d.com]

vray lights have options for affect diffuse, affect specular, affect reflections and those are seperate from setting the light to be visible in the render or not…