I was playing around with Blender 2.32 with Yafray and imported some flasks that I had from another file. I used the glass material that was already assigned to the sphere. I noticed that there are always very predominant reflections on both sides of the flasks that appear very “chromy”. It looks odd. I’d like the glass to be less reflective.
Any suggestions on how to tone down the reflections? I tried playing with the specularity, alpha, specular transparentity, reflection, camera angle, and many other parameters without any success.
I guess you meant with ‘glass already assigned to the sphere’ the material from one of the example files. Probably very confusing, but Blender’s RayMir parameter is mapped to yafray’s ‘min_refle’ parameter, which unlike what it’s name might suggest doesn’t control the amount of reflection but the fresnel mix factor. When it is 0, reflection is totally controlled by the fresnel factor (which in turn is determined by the ior parameter), when it is 1, reflections are completely uniform (fresnel is off).
So what that means in plain English, is that if you want realistic glass/metal reflections, enable the ‘Ray Mirror’ button in blender, but set the RayMir slider to 0 (ior must be higher than 1 in that case). Only when you are not happy with the amount of reflection you get, then adjust RayMir.
Fresnel is important too for metals, this means that you would have to set ior to a high value, higher in fact then the range allowed by the Blender ior slider, so for metals you probably will want to increase raymir, even if the reflections will be less realistic. This also means that when setting raymir to 0 for mirror materials the ior value must be higher than 1, if it is 1 and raymir is 0, there will be no reflection.
I can understand that for some people all this sounds very confusing…
