Material: Mirrors

[erilaz]

have you tried using the flat mirror material? That can work quite well.

[gaggle]

If you use a Raytrace material-node in the Reflection-channel, and leave it at the default 100%, any resulting grayness would be due to your environment. A mirror, as you can probably imagine, is defined through it's environment, like chrome and silver and all those madly reflective surfaces.

Mirrors can be tricky to get right sometimes.. just keep in mind that even in the real world they can confuse and infuriate us in certain situations, and it's only through realising that what we're looking at is ourselves or our environment from another angle that we know it's a mirror. If for whatever reason that doesn't instantly happen then we have the scenario of thinking, just for a split-second, someone else walked by in there or whatnot.

[Marcel]

When I use the raytraced reflections it tends to look too gray or washed out.

To solve this problem set your diffuse color to (allmost) black. That way the only color on the mirror comes from the reflection, just like a real mirror.

If you are using a flat plane as the mirror object then using a flat mirror map is a very good idea indeed. Much faster then raytrace (unless you are going to mix the two in one scene, then you are better of with only raytrace).

[Jon_Pran]

Thanks. The black did the trick. The raytrace and flat mirror look identical, as far as I can see, but it's great to know that the fm takes much less time (I'll be rendering a lot of mirrors in the future :-).

Much appreciated, I was about to go and start messing with the lighting (100 or so omnis).

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