- [Patrick Goski] In this video, we're going to take a look at the difference between a specular highlight and a reflection. In this scene, we have the owl model that we are going to be using, as well as a basic setup with a camera and a sky object with the material applied. The sky object is something that can be reflected. Now, if we click render, we're going to see that we don't get any results. And if we take a look at the render settings, the reason for this is because under the options, the default light has been disabled. If we enable the default light and click render again, we'll be able to see the results of the render. And in this case, the default light is simply sitting behind the camera, and it's used when there is no global illumination in the scene and no actual lights that have been added. In this case, we're going to leave the default light turned off. We can now add our own light to the scene, and if we go to the views, we're just going to position this. And then, we can click on render to see the result. Next, we're going to create a new material and call this Owl Body, and apply this to the owl body in the object manager. If we click on the material, we can take a look at the reflectants channel, we can see that there is a default specular that has been added to the material. Now, a specular is a fake of the reflection of this light, and if we go to the color and reduce the color so that we have something darker, we'll get a clear description of what the specular is. So we can see here that all of these bright points are actually the specular in action. If we go back to the reflectants tab and then click on the default specular, we can adjust the parameters of this specular to further exaggerate this effect. So we can change the width and render again, and we'll see that we get a brighter specular that is much thinner. When using a point light or an omni light in this case, or something like a spot, the specular's always going to be represented by a single point on the object that is then kind of spread out to help produce a blurry-like effect. But we still have this sky inside the scene that is not seen at all, and that's because the speculars are only going to occur when we have an actual light object in the scene. Now, if we switch the light type to something like an area light, we have the option of adding the area light to the reflection, but it's also going to be taking into consideration by the specular. So we can render and we'll see that we still have a specular highlight on the object, although it does appear a lot softer. And this is because the area light is essentially a large plane that has many point lights inside it that are being used as a source for the specular. One thing that can happen here is if your specular width is too small when using the area light, you're going to start seeing individual points from these lights that are spread along the plane. So although the area light can be used to cast specular, you do have to make sure that the specular width is wide enough so that all of these points blend together, and you don't notice them in your render. Now, if we wanted to use reflections, that's a little bit different. We'll just go ahead and add a new reflectants layer on here, Beckman in this case, and by default, it's going to be set to have a reflection strength as well as a specular strength, so we can reduce the specular strength to zero. Now if we click on render, we're going to see the material that's on the sky object reflected in this material, so the reflection is a direct representation of all of the light or materials on the scene or other objects. The area light itself also has the ability to be seen in these reflections. So let's hide the sky object and then render. And you're going to see that the reflected environment is just black. But if we go to the area light, we can go to the details tab, and in here, we have an option to show in reflection. If we enable this and render, the area light is going to be represented as a plane floating in space that is luminous. And now we can actually see that in the reflection of the object. So just to recap, in this video we covered the differences between the specular and the reflection. A specular is a fake of the reflected light of a actual light object in the scene, and we can control the width of the specular, even though in some cases, there will be issues that will arise. If we're using an area light or just an environment, then we would want to use a reflection to get that to show up on our object. And in this case, we have the area light set to show in reflection, which is adding that plane into the scene, so that we can see it reflected in the object.