| TG Blur Reflect |
| TIPS |
| 1. How To Get Better Quality Blurs There are several methods for increasing the quality of the blurs. The first is to increase the number of directions used, with the best being to use all 4 (up, down, left and right). The next method is to use a greater number of Blur Steps, as the more “in-between” reflections that are calculated, the better the result. Both such approaches will slow the shader down by introducing more processing, resulting in longer render times. Note that adjusting the Blur Step Fade can help make a difference to the “look” of a reflection, giving a smoother and more natural look with appropriate settings. Also note that particularly high Blur Amounts will almost always look unnatural (as it will become apparent that the shader is only shifting the reflections in 4 directions!). It is important to realise that the scale of the scene itself plays a part here - remember that far away objects will be more shifted by the same Blur Amount setting than a nearby object, so for a scene with only nearby objects, a high Blur Amount may be suitable, while for scenes with far away objects, a lower Blur Amount may be required to prevent an unwanted look to the result. |
| 2. How To Get Faster Renders Generally, the opposite advice given in point 1 above! Reduce the directions the shader calculates, and reduce the number of Blur Steps. Note that this may well still give a sufficiently high quality result, particularly if the object using this shader is not prominent in the scene, or is fairly far away from the camera itself, or if there are bump maps used on the object. Quite often all that is required is a slight blurring and softening in order to give a more natural look, and some of the faster rendering settings can do that quite adequately. |
| 3. Does It Blur Itself? If an object using this shader reflects another part of itself, then yes (based on the Contribution parameter value), the shader will reflect itself, and blur the reflection of the reflection, which will also be blurred....... The essential thing to notice here is that an object which reflects itself will result in slower render times, more noticeably than one which does not reflect itself. After all, even at fairly average settings, this shader could be calculating 9 reflections directly, which would be a total of 81 reflections if each of those initial reflections encountered another part of the same object, and so on and so forth! |
| 4. Good Working Practices Since the shader can be potentially slow, there are some good working practices you can use which will help while you work on your scene. First, when producing test renders of other objects or of the scene, why not stick to low quality blurs? If you have found the high quality result that you want to use in the final render, you can save that as a preset, and use one of the basic blurs (or create a simplified and faster version of your own blur) to use during test renders and scene work. Alternatively, since the shader is designed for use as a layered shader, you can set the material up, then turn off the layer with TG BlurReflect in it. The material will remember all the settings, so you can reactivate the layer later when you are ready for a final render. |
| 5. Using the ShaderLab 2 Mapping Options Altering the ShaderLab 2 mapping (UV / Object / World) will have no effect on the results from this shader. |
| TG Blur Reflect Intro |
| TG Blur Reflect Parameters |
| TG Blur Reflect Tips |
| TG Blur Reflect Samples |
| TG Pack2 Index |