Looks like the guy renamed it. There is no "reflection image" node per-say. It's basically just a standard 2D image node plugged into a sphere map node.

I thought that at first as well, but I saw other examples of People in the forums posting pics with the same node. It's either a coincidence that multiple people renamed their nodes to the exact same thing, or there's more to it than just a rename!

yea thats all that is. It's just an image map pluged into a sphere environment map node and then plugged into the reflection color node. It's used to 'fake' reflections and often actually look a lot more realistic then raytraced reflections, since there is often nothing for the raytrace reflections to reflect in the scene Has anyone ever figured out a way to have both mapped and raytraced reflections on the same material?

"It's either a coincidence that multiple people renamed their nodes to the exact same thing, or there's more to it than just a rename!"

It's just a logical way to rename the node for reference sake. There's really nothing special about it.

"Has anyone ever figured out a way to have both mapped and raytraced reflections on the same material?"

Yeah, it's simply a matter of plugging your raytrace reflection node into the reflection color channel (as per normal), then plugging your reflection map (image map) into the color slot of the reflection node you just plugged in. If you wanna use a sphere map node, then that goes into the raytrace reflection node's color first, followed by the image map. What this does is simply raytrace everthing it can see, and places the map in the areas in the scene that are empty, or that have no objects to reflect. Like a sky, for instance.. Message edited on: 04/13/2005 14:13

Slaps forehead doh, now that you mention it, I think I've done that before. I guess thats what poser 6 until 2:30 am then waking up at 6:30 am will do to ya. thanks,

Can this be apply to a mirror too and how would you do that.

Sure, it can act as a mirror material too. Because a mirror is a flat plane object, you wouldn't need the sphere map between the image map and the reflect node. So plug the image map into the reflect node directly.

what does the image map have to be. is it a defult thing?

not too bad, I may mess around with this when I get home. The reflection map can be any image file the Poser can read, which is most of them.

So if I want a poser character's back t show in a mirror, how do I do that.

2 ways, The first would be to just do it through a raytraced reflection node plugged into the reflection node at the tree base. Or you could do what they used to do in P4 and fake it by rendering the scene from a camera angle that displays what you want to show in the mirror. Save that as a image file, then use that as the reflection map. That's the hard way of doing that, and with P5 and P6 (I don't know about PP) supporting raytraced reflections, it's an unnessecary burden. Now a days the reflection map is mainly use to reflect something that isn't in your scene (ie the sky, or an off camera character) so you don't get a 'null' reflection ( a reflection of nothing)

You don't even have to plug a texture map into the reflection node, procedural shaders work just as well. If you want to have a chrome reflection for instance, a sphere_map and a Clouds shader (adjust the colors) is very good for reflecting sky. Procedural shaders slow down the render - they have to be calculated - but are much more memory efficient than texture maps.

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