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Highlight Material Property
AccuRender 3.1 includes a new material property: highlight. This property controls the "glossiness" of a material. Use the highlight property for plastics and glossy materials that you do not want to be reflective, but want to have the effect of a glossy finish.
The image below is a red material with highlight turned on. For reference, there is also an image with the red material with highlight turned off. You can see that with highlight turned on, the material looks glossy. This is due to the white reflections of the light sources in the scene. Highlight controls only the reflection of light sources. This should not be confused with the Reflective Finish control on the Main tab of the Material Editor. The Reflective Finish control, as you can see in the third image, also creates a material that reflects light sources, but the material also reflects other objects in the scene and the background, which highlight does not.
Highlight turned on.
Highlight turned off.
Reflective finish turned up.
To turn on highlight, in the Material Editor, on the Highlight tab, check the Specify Highlight box.
Once the highlight has been turned on, you can control the size, strength, and color of the highlight. The Sharpness control sets the size of the highlight. The control's range is 1 - 301. Lower numbers specify a broader highlight; higher numbers focus the highlight in a smaller area. Values from 1-50 make the most change, 50-300 make little change. The intensity slider adjusts the strength of the highlight. The range is 0-2. This is a multiplier of the strength. For example, 0.5 will only use half the strength of the highlight, while a value of 2 will double the strength of the highlight. You can also change the color of the highlight with the color selector.
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