[Brian Jones]

the latest update to R19 (just today) has “a stability fix for the Spline IK tag” in among the other fixes.

[Brian Jones]

I get the same thing with the setup but this is what I get when I dump the Fresnel Shader in the Layer Color (which is what is killing reflections that are pointing at the camera) and use a Layer Fresnel set to Conductive/Mercury (check out the others too)

[Brian Jones]

that’s because you have the Brightness of the Layer Color in the Beckman down to 15% – Crank that backup to 100% and you see a reflective surface. In 19 Reflectance, reflection is controlled by Global Reflection Brightness, Reflection Strength, Brightness (in the Layer Color) and Layer Fresnel (more?)

[Brian Jones]

yes, there should be a link left of where the Reply button is or it’s up top if your post alone, not in threaded mode

[Brian Jones]

Which versions? Just curious, this file is from R11 and is using just simple reflection not reflectance yet (at least until R20…).
You have a perfectly reflective texture on the only two objects in the scene and everything else is pure black so there is nothing to reflect except each other but they have identical materials (the same material). I do see the reflection of the sphere in the floor but the floor on the sphere is really hard to see (I assume it’s the fresnel). Try removing the fresnel and what do you get? I get blackness because now all a perfect reflection of all that blackness around the two objects, you could:
– make the light visible or
– you could reduce the strength of the reflection a bit or
– use Layer Fresnel (if it exists yet in R11, I don’t remember)
– add other objects in the scene for the sphere and floor to reflect besides each other (that hopefully don’t have the same perfectly reflective surface)
-etc.

[Brian Jones]

can you post that file?

[Brian Jones]

not that I know of, the help says:
“If Object / Spline is selected in Area Shape, you can use any (polygonal) object or spline for the shape of your light. Simply drag the shape into the light’s Object text field.
Note:
If an object is used that was deformed using a deformations object, the shape of the object prior to its deformation will be used. Applying the Current State to Object will create a deformed polygon object that can be used.
”
and I don’t know any other way around that besides baking the deformation in. Otherwise, put a luminant texture on the cylinder and use it as the light using GI (which you said you don’t want to do).

[Brian Jones]

you can Bake the cylinder in the Timeline. Timeline/Functions/Bake Objects (with the cylinder selected – you will likely have to drag the cylinder into the timeline). PLA is the important setting, I’d uncheck the others (on the bottom) if you don’t need them. I’d leave the top 3 turned on. That will make a baked copy, remove the Bend from that (which will be ‘double bending’ now) and use that as the area source in the light.

[Brian Jones]

when you put a transparent texture on the voronoi fracture it reveals what is always true, the one object is really many. That doesn’t matter if it’s not a transparent texture as long as it doesn’t separate too soon due to self collisions… here though I tried a number of things to get it not to break too early (turning the VF from Enabled Off to On looks like it should work in the viewport but the result in the renderer is wrong) so ended up with this.
I went with turning Hull only Off and On in the VF. It seemed to take VF/Sources tab Distribution Type being Inverse Normal when I tested on a sphere but substituting with a ‘glass’ type object that doesn’t seem to be true…

12625_xpressotokeepvftogetheruntilimpactwithtransparency2.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

thanks for the solution, it might be useful to someone in the future