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Topic: Specular highlights and the VRay material

posted by Metin Seven
archived on 6.2.2003

The VRay material rules, but sometimes I really miss a fake highlight
option, like the one in the standard Max material. Sometimes I don't have
the time to set up a number of white planes etc. around my scene in order to
get true highlights by using reflections. Next to this it is sometimes
difficult to get a nice bright highlight on the front side of an object when
you use the VRay Advanced material's Fresnel reflections.

I found a workaround: Blur Studios have created a great material a few years
ago already, which includes an updated version for Max 4 / 5. It's called
HighlightOnly and the name says it all. You can create a nice, separately
adjustable highlight layer on top of any material and it seems to work fine
with the VRay Advanced material. You can even create anisotropic highlights
with the HighlightOnly material and assign bump map and other maps to the
highlight layer.

Ideal usage of the HighlightOnly material is to additively composite it onto
a VRay Advanced material by using the Shellac material, with a Shellac value
of 100.

Oh, one last note: the Blur Beta website currently copes with problems and
the HighlightOnly archive that can be downloaded from there turned out to be
corrupted. Alternatively, download it from Max3D at 3DLuVr.com. Here's the
direct link: www.max3d.com/plugins/r4/HighlightOnly.zip. You'll also
need to copy the Blur Library to your Max/Plugins directory for
HighlightOnly to work. Grab the BlurLib here:
www.max3d.com/plugins/r4/blurlib.zip.

Have a lot of highlight fun!

www.sevensheaven.nl

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