Mirror

[mister3d]

Blinns, phongs and other shading models are fake blurred reflections, i.e they will never give you accurately looking reflections. Real-looking reflectins are created with raytracing - shooting rays from camera in the mirror and tracing for each pixel where the reflection will go. You can try mental ray renderer which is built-in in maya, and using mental ray material, find reflection parameter. Set it to 100% value and that's it.
I guess in new maya there must be an arch&design unified shader tree, which is very easy to use and has almost everything you may need in first years of your cg exploration.

[pap87]

As far as i know there's nothing fake about blinn and phong reflections.

To make a mirror material basically turn the colour of your phong or blinn to black and reflectivity to about 100% (specular colour also needs to be white or it will tone down the reflectivity) and make sure raytracing is ticked on in the render globals and you should have a working mirror material.

[mister3d]

As far as i know there's nothing fake about blinn and phong reflections.


Well. I thought blinn and phong are specular shading models and do not raytrace real reflections. Raytraced reflections are just added to bulk to make the job phongs and blinns can't do. Considering it's a microstructure causing different glossy behaviour, it's not really calculated, it's just a rough approximation. Correct me if I'm wrong of course.

[JamesMK]

Considering it's a microstructure causing different glossy behaviour, it's not really calculated, it's just a rough approximation. Correct me if I'm wrong of course.
No, it's absolutely correct. Blinn/Phong specular highlights are just fakes that have no relation to the actual appearance of the lightsource. Good enough for most cases, but certainly no replacement for real reflections. And as far as mirrors go, raytraced reflection is of course the answer - typically an entirely black material without any properties other than a 90-95% reflectivity setting.

[pap87]

Yeah, the specular is of course a fake reflection of the light source, but i was just referring to the reflectivity component (since she mentioned mirror) which requires raytracing to reflect so i assume that's not faked.

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