I thought this would be a lot simplier than it actually turned out. I've been doing fake mirror shots for my sales pages for a long time now, only way you can do them in Poser 4. I thought I'd try a "real" one in Poser 5, which otherwise pretty much sits unused on my system. While I was at it I'd thought I do a triple mirror, and get three reflections, for a change from my standard oval mirror. So I built a little mirror prop in Max, with the wings folded in 45 degrees, and took it into Poser 5. First thing I notice is Poser 5 seems to do a lot more rounding of corners than Poser 4 does, and that was with the "Smooth polygons" option (or whatever it is called) off. The mirror looked more like a fun house mirror, in fact. The other thing I noticed was I could spend the rest of my life trying to position it to get the reflections right, as getting one reflection centered messed up the other two. I tried another prop with 30 degree wings, and closer pitched polygons at the edges, still no joy, but I could see the light at the edge of the tunnel... So I built a third mirror, this one is a figure, the wings now pivot as required, and they scale in and out too. I used really, really tiny mesh spacing at the edges, where the mirror meets the edges, and tiny almost flat bevels, this one also seems optically flat. So I took it into Poser 5 after setting it up and Gee, it works! It took about 10 renders to get the angles right, but I can get 3 good reflections, Wow, Poser 5 is good for something! ;-) I think the girl isn't too bad either...

Nice, but how long did it take for P5 to do the render?

I agree about the girl. Personally I would have kust used primitives and materialed one side as glass them in the material editor made it like a mirror. I have to say P5 can certainlt do mirrors to my happiness.

Nice work Jim, as usual:) It's nice to hear personal stories from the trenches of trial and error from some of the more polished folks. I've been pushing and pushing to get more out of P5 for a while now. It exausting but I seem to gain a little more ground each week. I especialy like the Materials room. My CPU hates the Cloth and Hair rooms (over night rendering and an extra chip fan is my only solution.. sigh).

Yes, how long did it take you to render this image? And how fast is your machine? Did it take you longer to render this image in P5 than it would have taken you to fake it in P4? Wouldn't it have been faster to export the lady as an obj and bring it into your other 3d- program and use its render engine to do ray-traced reflections?

Looks like you have a new store item, selling that mirror anytime soon?

It took about 20 minutes to render the final, which I did at 1200 x 1200 pixels. I did all the setup renders at 800 x 800 (it should have been smaller) with the "pixel samples" set to 1, they took about 4 minutes, I think. My AMD 1.4 is starting to show it's age, I expect to update later this year. The big advantage of having the mirror as a Poser figure and doing it in P5 was I could turn a dial a little and re-render it, rather than tring to reposition a primitive after rotating it. Plus it is a nice looking mirror, look at the piano hinge at the joints. ;-) Plus as slow as P5 is it is faster than Bryce (Bryce probably renders nicer, though). P5 seems to especially have problems with Trans-mapped hair in the reflections, the direct view is O.K., though. I have to figure out how to render properly in Max some day! MM- Ha! It will be in the Pro Club at Poser Pros in a couple of days. Ingenue Vickie should be up at DAZ for next weekend too, but you will not see this pic, as they don't like showing thongs in the sales pics. (I.V. isn't so sure about them either, as you can see.) I made the mirror to work up the pics for her, you get 4 views for the price of one!

Why not break the mesh at the edge of the mirror so that the normals do not bend? Have a mesh for the frame and one (single sided) for the mirror surface. That should fix the problem with the normals at the edges unless Poser 5 automatically joins all vertices. This is what I do in Rhino to prevent Poser from calculating the normals wrong at sharp edges. good luck, FlyerX

Heya Jim! It's great to see you experimenting with Poser 5! I think once you discover the possibilities of skin nodes and see what wonders they will do for your models, you might actually become a convert. ;-) Very nice mirror, too! It sounds like a real bargain as a Pro Club item -- thanks!