Ashraf Aiad with a quick little tip affecting reflections in Maya Mental Ray 2010 where the reflections would appear to spike or be way too bright while using a mia_material, HDRI and a floating point frame buffer.

“This problem appear when using a combination of mia_material , HDRI and floating point framebuffer. One would get very high spike in the reflected area of the Shader.”

1 comment

  1. EdW

    FYI – The tutorial fixes a problem that isn’t a problem!
    What they are doing with the exposure node is applying a tonemap onto HDR data, which is only useful if you have no plans to composite the image later.

    The “camera” can handle the HDR data just fine, it’s the *viewer* that is having problems — it cannot display color values greater than 1, and so it clips to those ugly-looking artifacts. This is in fact correct. Bring this image into Nuke, and you can do all kinds of fun stuff with all that extra data.

    The best way to deal with this “problem” is to render linearly (the artifacting image above) and tonemap the values later in your compositing package or Photoshop when converting back to LDR file formats.

    By the way, if you DO work this way, make sure to only render as an 8-bit image, because you’re wasting space by encoding any more pixel depth than that.

    Cheers!

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