Are glossy reflections supposed to have any IOR or is IOR special to transparent materials namely glass and water?
I’m speaking in terms of what is physically accurate here.
Also a side question, what’s the tangent input on the anisotropic shader?
Every object has an IOR, which is a fancy way of saying that objects will typically look more reflective at glancing angles (even ones that don’t seem that glossy at all).
To create, mix a glossy and diffuse shader together according to the output of the fresnal or layer weight nodes (you might need to create a curve adjustment to make it physically correct).
For your second question, the tangent input is there to allow you to determine the direction of the anisotropic reflection in a material (according to the greyscale value of a texture).
But I use the Fac input on the mix shader for a spectacular-like image map in combination with a roughness map on the glossy shader a lot of the time. Is there a better way to include that which wont hinder the overall look?
Hindering what look, care to give an example?
when using many mix shaders it can be difficult to maintain the accurate and ideal level of diffuse energy, or reflectivity, or so on depending on the node network.
If you want to use a spec map like that, you can just scale the fresnel output with a math node. It’s not exactly physically accurate, but a spec intensity map really isn’t accurate in the first place. It’s just something that’s handy a lot of the time.
So with this It will add the effect over the spec map so that both work without causing issues with each other?
I will give it a try. The spec map should work fine as a value too if I’m not mistaken, as it is a greyscale image with uses practically the same output/input.
Hmm, it seems the more the IOR the less the overall reflection amount. I don’t think that’s right.
Unless it is…
I’m a little confused.
No, that’s not right. You don’t have your mix inputs upside down, do you? Diffuse goes on top, glossy on the bottom.
Hmm, I think you MUST be right because when I put in just the Fresnel it looks the same. Very interesting.
Thank you, I think this is about as close as it gets to a physically accurate node group.
Also, am I correct in thinking that with glass materials, usually you’ll only use the glass shader’s IOR unless you’re doing some sort of special material, right?