Ok, I’ll show you some examples of some work I recently completed. One thing you have to remember is that a reflective surface isn’t going to reflect anything unless there is something to reflect. First things first – choose Window>Rendering Editors>Global Render. Here, you need to change a few things so the reflections show up better.
1. Under Resolution, change the preset to 640x480. This will make the rendering image bigger, showing more detail.
2. Under Anti-Aliasing Quality, change the preset to Production Quality and the Edge Anti-Aliasing to Highest Quality.
3. Under Raytracing, check the box beside “Raytracing.” Close the window.
Now, we shall create a cube. Choose Create>Polygon Primitives>Cube. Scale it up a bit. Right click it and choose Materials> Assign New Material> Phong. We need to change a few things in here as well.
1. Change the colour to black.
2. Change the Cosine to 100.
3. Change Secular colour to a light gray or white.
4. Reflectivity to 1.
5. Reflected colour to black.
6. Under Raytracing change Reflection limit to 10.
7. Change Reflection Specularity to 1.
Now that we have made what should turn out to be a mirror cube, we need to create a room to put it in. Choose Create> Polygon Primitives> Cube. Scale it so that it is bigger than the first cube. Right click it and choose Materials> Assign New Material> Phong. Now, to the right of the colour slider there is a checkered box. Click it then select the black and white checkered box. This assigns the room a checkered texture. Go back to the attributes editor for the room and click the hardware texturing tab. Here you should change the Texture Channel to colour and the Texture Quality to Highest. Did you see the resolution of the room just sharpen? Close the window.
Now to add some lights. Choose Create>Lights> Spotlight. Position it near one of the top corners of the room. Go to Panels>Look Through Selected. This makes you “inside” the light, enabling you to position it precisely how you want. In the channel box, (the window-like thing over on the right side of the screen) we need to change the Cone Angle to 100. Did you notice what happened? The ring you see grew bigger. This adjusts the light so that it shines over the entire room. You may need to make it a different value depending on the size of your room. After you have positioned it correctly, go to Panels>Perspective>Perspective. You are now back in the perspective view. Create another light and position it at the opposite corner of the room so that it is facing towards the first light you created. Choose Panel>Look Through Selected if you want to as you did before. Just remember to choose Panels>Perspective>Perspective to get back to the perspective view.
By default, Maya uses default lighting. To change it so that the lights we just created show up, choose Lighting>Use All Lights.
OK! Now that we have created our mirror box, our room, and some lights, it is time to render it. Position the camera inside the room facing towards the mirror cube. Render it. Done.
Now, I didn’t tell you how to make your floor all nice and shiny b/c I believe the best way to learn is to experiment. Obviously, you don’t want your floor to be a mirror, but using what I have just gone through, you should be able to modify the attributes enough to get the desired look you want. Try changing things one at a time, then rendering it to see what happens instead of changing them all at once as I did here. If you would like to read about an attribute, choose Help>Search. Type in Rendering Reference. Double-click "Rendering ReferenceIX" This brings you to a window that has a list of attributes and such. You can click on one of them to see the description of it. You may have to right-click the link and choose "open in new window" for it to work, though. Always remember that your reflected surface won’t reflect anything unless you have another object around for it to reflect.
Last edited by Darkware; 24-11-2002 at 09:25 PM.
