Just thought I'd throw out a little mini-tut on how to make realistic chrome in Poser 4. First of all, grab a landscape or other scene that depicts what you want to be reflected. You an shrink this pretty small and still use it. 200-300 pixels is generally fine. Don't use a smeary-grey image. That looks fake. Someone will inevitably want to flame me for saying that. Go ahead, I don't care. But let me nip that one in the bud so I don't have to reply with this twelve times: Smeary-grey reflection maps still suck and look fake all the time. If you have used a lot of smeary grey reflection maps, you have made a lot of fake-looking metal. End of story. So don't start. Sorry. Deal. If you don't like it, stop using smeary grey reflection maps. Now, once you have a landscape or scene you want reflected (if you don't, go to www.confluence.org or virtualtourist and grab one for your renders, they have zillions -- you're not violating anyone's copyright when their online photo is wrapped around a chrome bumper and completely unviewable as anything but a reflection. Indoor stuff can be tougher. If yuo have a good image, use it, if not, render one. Just place a camera right in front of the main thing you want to be chrome and pointed at where the main camera is going to be; render and, in an image editor, shift the entire thing horizontally halfway so the sides are in the middle. This will look almost like you raytraced it this way. Now, the next thing you want to do is load that up as a reflection map on your material. As the title indicates, I'm describing chrome, but other metals shoul be pretty easy to derive from this basis, by changing the material's diffuse colour and by changing the reflection colour (not too much!) Now, set your material to a dark grey colour and nudge it up a bit into the bluish. Chrome is bluish. (For the record, copper is dark orange, steel is dark grey or dark bluish grey, gold is a medium dull dun brown (like the default Renderosity link colour), and silver is a bit lighter than chrome and slightly greenish). Next, set your highlight colour. White. That's simple. Leave your ambient colour black. Next, set your reflection colour. For chrome, which reflects almost like a mirror, white. (Gold gets a very light yellow, steel gets a medium grey, copper a light peach or pink, and silver a light blue or yellow, depending on the quality of silver.) Now you want to set your highlight size. If you've played around with the highlight size, you've probably noticed that the size of the highlight gradually increases until you hit 90, then it leaps up and strengthens almost as much as 10-90 did in those last ten percentages. I call this last ten percent the 'metal zone' because that's what the upper ten percent is best for. Chrome is 99 or 100. Chrome is really bright. Gold, depending on the polish and the karats, but assuming some polish, sits from 95-99. Copper, when polished, will be about 94. Admittedly, most of the copper in the US resides in penny jars and inside wiring, and the former is usually a gross near-black or dull orange -- but that doesn't look very metallic. We're going for shiny metals. Steel is about 90 or maybe 93 for stainless. Silver can be anywhere in there depending on hos polished it is, but nicely polished silver usually sits about 94-95%. Now, set your reflection strength (you already loaded the reflection map). For chrome, you want about 80%. Copper is lower at around 55-60%. Steel, if polished, will be at about 70%, but can drop all the way to 30% for a less shiny surface. Gold will be about 75-80% usually, and silver will usually be a bit duller at around 70-75%. Make sure both mutliply through lights and multiply through object colour are not ticked. Close up your materials and render. One thing that is especially important to remember: use the same reflection map for all of your metal. Don't use a different map for each metal (unless perhaps you're going for a magickal effect). Don't use colour-tinted versions for the different metals -- that's what the reflection colour and, to some extent, the reflection strength combined withth diffuse colour are for. Follow these rules and you are on your way to makeing realistic-looking metal textures in Poser 4! Playing around with it will also lead you, like it did me, to figuring out all sorts of other cool and realistic reflction mapping tricks. For instance, white reflection colour, grey 30% highlight, almost-black diffuse, and a 20% reflection strength make for a beautiful shiny gloss black effect. Glass is best created by giving it a green or dark aqua colour, a .6 transparency falloff between a 70% min and a 95% max, a 30-40% highlight size, a white highlight colour, a white reflection colour, and a 40-50% reflection strength. And force fields and ghosts and energy-beings can be created with a white ambient colour, a black highlight colour, whatever diffuse colour you want, no reflection at all, and a trans falloff of .1 or .2 between 0% min and 95-100% max.

Thanks _dodger :o) Great tutorial! you're right that it is if not impossible, then VERY VERY hard to make those gray smeared reflectionmaps look like something real. I've seen a few that did, but in general, you're right.

TrekkieGirl: Yep, I should amend that, I suppose. I can think of two circumstances where smeary grey looks real: up in the clouds in a heavy storm, and on the astral plane B^)

Dodger, all of this made sense to me except for one step. Probably the most important one..."in an image editor, shift the entire thing horizontally halfway so the sides are in the middle." Can you please try to explain this a different way? Thanks,

Thanks for the great tutorial.

Thanks _dodger , Great mini tutorial I was unclear about allot of that. And guilty of thinking grey smeary worked best, hmm go figure . Did you mean to rotate the photo 90* in the " horizontally halfway " part ?

what...no screens shots....LOL

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The sliding the image thing: For some reason, if you don't do this, Poser will do this, and the reflection map will show up with a visible line up the middle. Actually, any reflection map does this, but with most landscape stuff you cannot tell. You can experiment with it easily with a sphere and see what I mean. I found this out while trying to fake raytracing -- the attached image to this shows a shifted reflection map and is rendered in Poser 4.0.3

If I hadn't slid that over, it would have had a seperation running down the centre. In Photoshop the easiest way to slide an image is using the Filter->Other->Offset filter. Use Wrap Around mode and shift the image half it's width horizontally, 0 vertically.

This recent freestuff item of mine is a particularly good example of the shiny chrome effect

The reflection map used on that is this

Thanks for sharing the tip, Dodger- a lot of useful detail in there. Perhaps you could post it as a mini-tutorial anywhere else, so it doesn't get lost in the depths of the forum?

No worries. I'm planning to make a less-mini tutorial just haven't gotten around to it yet.