VRay for Rhino Manual

Every object has certain degree of reflection. Some are very strong, and some weak. But this doesn't mean we have to apply reflection to every single object in the scene because that will increase your rendering time significantly.

Reflection Glossiness

You don't always get clear reflection from reflective material. Objects like matte finish metal, wood and some plastic materials do not reflect the lightsource clearly due to its uneven surfaces. This is because the uneven surfaces create many reflecting angles for light to bounce around. So the highlight is not as sharp if compare to reflection from smoother surfaces. The best way to create this kind of rendering quality is playing around the setting of both Highlight Glossiness and Reflection Glossiness.

The default value for both Reflection and Highlight Glossiness is 1, which means that the reflections will be perfectly sharp. Once the value is decreased below 1 the reflections begin to become blurry. A value of 0 would mean that the reflections are completely blurred, and this would look similar to a material without a reflection layer at all. Setting this for regular materials would cause extremely long render times. A good range for creating glossy reflections is between .5 and 1. At values below .5 the effect is similar to a material without reflections.

Below are results from combinations of various intensities of Reflection Glossiness and Fresnel IOR.

Samples of Reflection Glossiness

Reflection Filter

The filter color is used to apply color to reflections. You can see that by changing the filter color on each of the renderings below the color of the reflections change. The magnitude of this effect will change based on the strength of the reflections themselves. In the case of materials which are very reflective, filer color may be an effective way to change the object’s appearance.