Overview

ReflectionUtility is a custom Mental Ray shader that computes smooth, customizable, blurred raytrace reflections. It works by supersampling reflection rays and does oversample the whole scene as the DGS shader does. It is a much faster and more controllable solution in most situations, as you can define a fixed amount of samples per material. It has some other useful reflection related features: anisotropy, Fresnel effect, saturation and color modification, bump mapping that effects only the reflections to create distortions.

Version changes:

1.31 - No need to use the passthrough_deriv shader. No code changes though, I'm simply sure now that its not required anymore.
1.3 - Anisotropic effect works with polygonal geometry. (Of course you need proper UV coordinates.)
1.2 - Linux version included in the zip file. Many thanks to Mark Davies and Andrew Cammarano for compiling it.
1.2 - Anisotropic effect, max raytrace distance (using mi_ray_falloff), GUI changes.
Sadly because of the new attributes the shader has to be re-connected in existing scenes. Sorry but this is a limitation of the current Mental Ray for Maya plugin.
1.1 - Default values now work and currently not available settings are dimmed in the UI.
1.0 - First release

Use shader at your own risk.

Any ideas, corrections, bugreports, kind words are much appreciated.
(Thanks goes to Daniel Rind for his source code that inspired me and helped to write this shader.)

2005.02.