Glossy material, reverse colour pick?

[mdharrington]

I seem to remember this before....not sure if it is intentional or accidental.


When picking specular colour on the glossy material....the result is the image reflects the opposite colour in the spectrum....so basically you are picking which colour gets absorbed.

Also the intensity is backwards....picking a darker colour the material shines brighter and vice versa.

This is in version 2 LW

[juanjgon]

Here it works fine, a glossy node with red specular reflects red light. Can you post an example?

-Juanjo

[mdharrington]

i will as soon as i can....away from the machine right now.

[gordonrobb]

I get this behaviour when the diffuse is white. Have to say though, I never use a colour for specular. Should I?

[mdharrington]

here it is...
scene attached, background removed but the effect is the same

[mdharrington]

this is probably something in the render itself....I seem to remember this discussion before....but it is a little weird that the color will reverse depending on the color of diffuse....

I guess in real world black absorbs everything but the color you pick...whereas white would reflect everything except the color you pick...

But this would be very confusing with image maps

[mdharrington]

any ideas on this?

is this a bug, or intentional behavior?

[juanjgon]

any ideas on this?

is this a bug, or intentional behavior?

It is intentional, because the Standalone also has this behavior. Something related to the physical shading and energy conservation perhaps?

-Juanjo

[mdharrington]

Well I am definitely not qualified to comment on energy conservation....but it seems odd that if your specularity would be close to 1 then the color absorption is reversed?
But maybe that is the way it is....I kinda slept through physics