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| Warning |
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Avoid setting the Reflectance 0° color too bright. Setting it to 255 for example means this material will reflect back almost all the light it receives, which does not happen in the real world. Maxwell Render still keeps the amount of light reflected/ absorbed within physical limits but the result with such high Reflectance values means the light will keep bouncing around in your scene with very little loss in energy, which will produce noisier renders and a washed-out look with very little contrast. A reasonable setting even for very bright materials would be around 230225-240235. For example, the Reflectance value of a white piece of paper, when converted to RGB, is around 225. Please note that this only matters for the Reflectance 0° color. The Reflectance 90° color can be left at fully white (RGB 255) This rule is valid also when using textures for the reflectance 0 - if your texture contains fully white areas use the RGB Clamp setting in the Texture picker to contain the range of brightness in the texture ( set the high value of RGB clamp to lower than 255). |
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It might be easier to keep Reflectance 0 colors within reasonable brightness limits by switching the Color Picker from RGB mode to HSV mode. In this mode, you control the brightness of the hue directly with the V or Value slider. This allows you to control the overall brightness with one slider instead instead of 3 for RGB, while maintaining the same hue and saturation.