bored at night, just a quick render, multipipe, emissive color, glass, reflective grid, rhino cycles (rendered in 5 minutes on my stone age machine)
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When you say “Ancient” in regards to your computer is it like Mine: Core I7 3930K/ AMD Vega 56?
hi Robb, i believe mine is a bit older, 2,3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB
from 2013. i bought it 2nd hand and had to sell a 2009 macbook pro 2 years ago, since it would not run the new system, otherwise it worked well. it is not that i cant afford a newer computer, i just did not want to get into all those overheating troubles which were around and i also enjoy a silent computer. now i am waiting for a decent apple silicon version.
still have a powerbook g4 in the cupboard which is waiting to get a motherboard bake in the oven due to some graphics card soldering issues.
a little update, wanted the emissive color to reflect better in the floor and also tweaked a few settings. unfortunately it is very difficult to keep the white lines visible without graying out the overall reflection too much. i guess i might need something like emissive alpha channel. @nathanletwory is there any way to create emissive images?
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Just put the image in a PBR material on the emission channel and assign that material to the ground plane.
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thanks Nathan, will try in a few days when i get back, does also work with transparent png i guess?
Only one way to find out!
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so, i got a quick chance to fiddle around and a transparent png seems to work but not as sufficient as predefining the black in the imported texture. in the 2 samples below the first one is with a predefined black the 2nd is transparent and the black is defined in rhino but that does not give me any proper result, i have to tone down emission a lot that it does not overpower and the contrast of the black base becomes oblivious. that unfortunately cancels out the option to adjust the rest of the texture in rhino.
emissive texture completely imported with black predefined
here a transparent texture (white) imported the rest defined as base material in rhino
also i am confused with how reflections work in i assume you mean PB Materials? or what is PBR? the problem is when i set metallic which seems for me the only logical way to reflect something to the value of 1 it basically shows no reflection at all and it does now allow anything higher than 1. going down towards 0.1 i get some reflection but not strong enough and seems to find its saturation curve there without getting stronger.
PBR material is the PB material you are talking about. PBR is short for Physically Based Rendering, and a term commonly used in the rendering industry.
Anyway, without a file it will be guessing work. So I’m going to guess that you have also pretty high roughness set that makes metals very dull. Metallic set to 1.0 means you have a purely metallic material. 0.0 is a non-metallic material. Both respond also to the roughness setting. A roughness of 1.0 is essentially scattering light very much, roughness of 0.0 would equal perfect reflection.
I did not understand how you set up the ground plane from your description. Again, a file would be more useful to have to guide conversation.
hi nathan, thanks again for responding. the roughness i varied trying to understand if that might have been the problem but that did not lead anywhere, setting it to 0 the reflection problem still seems to track back to the metallic setting. the plane is as described just a simple plain with texture one with transparent png as emissive and with a black base color the other one completely imported. i will post a file later when i sit on my station again.
@nathanletwory so here is the file and 3 renderings below,
this one has metallic activated meaning 1 and 0 roughness strangely zero reflection
this one has 0 metallic 0 roughness
this one has 0 metallic and 20% roughness
the ultimate goal would be to use roughness but with far more reflection like in post nr 4
i am wondering maybe the mac version has a bug? or am i just doing it totally wrong or expecting too much 
saturday night fever.3dm.zip (684.6 KB)
Not yet. Currently sick.
no worries, get healthy!
Not entirely sure what is going on with the reflection, it appears that more glancing angles for the camera rays help getting better reflections for your emissive pipework.
I think the problem here is with the emission on the plane material. Setting emission means it is going to cast light, and it looks like that is messing with the effect you’re looking for.
I have currently no good solution for what you’re trying to achieve.
thanks nathan, metallic does not make any sense to me currently…
where can i find these settings?
Glancing angle isn’t a setting, but rather the case where the line of sight is more parallel to the surface than perpendicular: move the camera closer to the ground plane while still looking at your pipework. Note how the reflection becomes much more apparent the more the line between camera and look target is in line with the ground plane.
hi @nathanletwory i assumed that when i change the emission color that it should emit the set color. currently the object gets colored but the emission stays white. bug, intended?
Untitled.3dm (3.4 MB)
Hi @encephalon
You need something for the light to shine on. Cycles doesn’t support volumetric lights, so you can not see “light” as such. You need a surface for the light to reflect off that is not completely black and matte (or the shadowcatcher material, which only catches… well, shadows 
).
HTH, Jakob
Edit: The plaster material in your scene is practically “Vanta Black” or similar. Almost 100% black and completely matte and will reflect almost no light. You’ll need to bump the intensity way up to see any light reflect off that!
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