- In this video, we're going to take a look at the different attenuation methods found within a reflectance layer of the reflectance channel. We're going to start by creating a new material and calling this Owl Body. We'll then apply this to the owl body in the object manager, and then select the owl body material to take a look at the attributes. Now, the first thing that we're going to do is remove the default specular and then add a simple Beckman reflectance layer to the reflectance channel. Next, we're going to set the specular strength down to 0% and look at the attenuation methods that we'll be using when working with a reflection. So the first thing that we'll do is click render, and this is going to give us a render of our object with the reflective material. When dealing with the average mode, it's going to produce a result that blends between fully reflective or, as we change the layer mask amount, something that is partially reflective. So here, we can see a layer mask amount of 40%, and then 0% is going to show the color channel all by itself. And we can do anything in between. Generally, when you are dealing with reflections, setting the attenuation to average is going to be your go-to attenuation method. If we click on the attenuation drop down, we'll also see that we have options for maximum, additive, and metal. With reflections, the two that you really need to worry about are average and maximum. Most of the time, you're going to rely on average. But when you're dealing with something like a color in the layer mask or layer color fields, then you'll want to change the attenuation method. If we set the color for the layer mask to red and then click on render, we're going to see a blend between the actual red reflection and the color channel below. And this is because when we are setting this to red, some of the areas in the actual reflection, specifically the darker areas will allow the color channel to show through. By switching the attenuation method to maximum, these darker areas will now just show a darker reflection that is still red, rather than allow the color channel to come through. You can still use the layer mask amount to blend between this reflection and the color channel. So here, we can see the finished render, and we're still getting a little bit of contribution of that red color over the color channel in the darker areas of the reflection. So, when dealing with reflections, you want to use an attenuation of average or maximum. Most of the time, you'll use average. But in some cases, especially when using colored reflections or color in the layer mask, you'll want to use the maximum attenuation method. The next two attenuation methods are going to be additive and metal, and these ones will be most commonly used when you're working with a specular. So, we'll start by setting the layer mask amount to 100% and the color back to white. We'll then reduce the reflection strength and increase the specular strength to 100%. When dealing with the specular, we also need to add some roughness to actually get some sort of effect from the specular in the scene. So we can click on render and see the results. Now, at the moment, the specular is not blending with the color channel, and that's because it's set to maximum. The same thing is going to happen if we set this to average. So in both cases, average and maximum should only be used with the reflections. For a specular, you want to stick to additive, and this will add the specular highlight on top of the color channel, Now if we render, we're going to see the color channel with the bright specular on top. Since the attenuation is set to additive, we can safely adjust the specular strength to control the height of the specular in the render. But as always, to keep things consistent with how we're working with reflections, we'll leave the specular strength at 100% and just adjust the height using the layer mask amount. The other method for attenuation when using a specular is metal. In this case, it's going to add the specular where it's brighter, and subtract where it's darker. If we click on render, we're going to see that the result that we get is very similar to using the average or maximum mode. But where things start to change is when the specular gets rougher. Now if we render, we'll see that the specular still contributes as we would expect, but in the wider areas, we're getting more contribution from the color channel. So just to recap, in this video we covered the different attenuation methods that can be used with a reflectance layer. In this case you have average, which is going to be your go-to attenuation method when using a reflection model. You can then select maximum when using reflections, if you would like to maintain the color that you set in the layer mask. So here we can see a color set in the layer mask with the average mode, and the color channel is showing through. And here we can see the attenuation set to maximum, where the reflection is just showing black when the layer mask color is set to red. We then looked at the additive and metal attenuation methods, and these are going to be used when you're dealing with a specular. Additive simply adds the specular highlight on top of the color channel, while metal is going to make it so that the specular either adds or subtracts from the color channel. So here, we can see the add mode adding the specular on top, and here we can see metal, where it is adding the specular in areas that are bright, and then subtracting in darker areas. As the specular gets wider, we see something that looks a bit more realistic.