Creating Your Own Custom Fresnel Curves in Maya

The Render Blog posts a great article in creating your own custom fresnel curves in Maya.

A few years ago we would use the facing ratio and a ramp to achieve that effect

The fresnel response can suggest a wide variety of different materials, and João does a little experiment analyzing the reflection curves from a test scene render in Maya to find some values.

João walks you through using Maya nodes to draw the fresnel curve manually in Maya, and writes a python script that can assist in drawing the curves using fresnel formulas found online.

This is quite a bit more technical than using the old and nonphysical method of using a ramp and a sampler info node to get simulated fresnel effects in rendering. Have a look at the Redner Blogs’ post for Custom Fresnel curves in Maya here.

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