I've gone through a couple of tutorials and followed instructions, but my mirror does not reflect. I applied the reflect node to the reflective color channel, etc..but just a shiny surface..no reflect. any ideas on how to do it?

I had issues with this in the beginning also. Default settings of the reflect node on the reflect color should give you the mirror finish. Firefly must be used, raytracing on. The items must have some lighting, and must be set to be visible in raytracing. Here is an example, high-res square, a cube, and a ball.

Wow! I've seen this effect a few times, and I love it. Can it be done in PP4?

I fianlly got it to work :) It actually looks pretty good..raised the quality to 1..it defaults to .2 a bit hazy looking...will have to play with it a bit more, but the render time is fairly long, especially for experimentation..

Yup, render times do suffer. Foxseelady, unfortunately PP4 does not raytrace, you would have to fake the reflection. Render from the mirror's POV, mirror the image in Photoshop, then paste it onto the mirror's texture map. It's a little work, but for simple reflections, this method works well.

There have been some threads on this that may help:

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1149490#4

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=920279

raised the quality to 1..it defaults to .2 Don't do that unless you really need to. 0.2 is a decent default, a quality of 1.0 will just render forever. a bit hazy looking Set the diffuse_value of the root node to 0.

Oh, here I was thinking that he'd loaded Vampire Vicky 3.0. I'll go back to my gutter now......

LOL :)