I want to make a reflective 'showroom' floor in poser 6 - but cant get it to actually 'be' reflective. Ive used the 2d hi res square, and given it a reflective node on ambient, but it doesnt work, ive even added one under reflection and nothing....... Help!!

You need to plug a RayTrace Reflection node (under Lighting options) into the Reflection Color plug.. And then click on RayTrace in the Render Options.. Keep in mind that raytracing can drastically increase render times.. My most recent render takes 15 minutes without raytrace, but about 12 hours with it..

And don't forget...at least one light must be set to ray-traced shadows.

Don't be using the Hi Res square, either. You'll get better results with the single poly One Sided Square.

" And don't forget...at least one light must be set to ray-traced shadows" Why is that? i never have raytraced lights and can still do reflections

Doesn't work for me unless I have at least one light set to ray-traced shadows.

Can we see a screenshot of your scene? Ditto on other comments... Reflect is a triangle between reflected object, reflective surface and camera. You can even use an infinite light anywhere in your scene(Set at any setting. Even no shadows), Ray Trace enabled and get a reflection or refraction. Gotta have something to reflect....?, though.

It may be in your render options, raytrace must be on, with at least one bounce.

Just a simple (and not very good) example of how to do it.. This was done in the last 10 mins or so (most of which was taken up with doing the screen caps) Just a sphere over the ground plane.. The ground-plane settings

.. The render settings ..

The result. You can (just) see the reflection of the sphere in the ground plane. There's only 1 sphere and 1 light (not ray-traced) in this scene. The reflection is very degraded, I grant, but using a 1-sided square (as suggested above) would probably improve matters. But this was just to show what could be done with minimal props... Now it's up to you to improve on it:-))

Cheers,
Diolma

Message edited on: 01/09/2006 18:14

man oh man I can't get a reflective floor either lol I was also trying to do a showroom floor. I'm gonna go back and retry the stupid thing (you see it has to be posers fault and not mine ;) sigh sooner or later I'm going to win though! :) Thanks for the tips I was almost ready to give up and settle for something a little different but instead I'm going to try yet again....

Okay the edit button is gone lol But thank you very very much for this thread and Diolma for the tips and screen shots. I had my render over set to background and my bucket size way lower, changed them and voila! There is my reflection!!! woohoo see......I win ;) ..........but it was still posers fault snickers and runs off to finish now

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/tut.ez?Form.ViewPages=202

Don't forget to browse the Tutorials section for great techniques. In this case, there's a great one on Reflections for P5 (works the same in P6)

Thank you all very much for your advice and suggestions. I will try then when I get back from work today.
I'll also post up a picture of my scene as well.

In http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1120890, the floor and back wall are single sided squares - the blue outline around the reflection on the back wall was done by simply placing a blue spot light in front of the characters.

BTW, SP2 for P6 makes reflections a lot easier to do.

Message edited on: 01/10/2006 13:46

.....

Finally got round to posting a follow-up.... Got the reflections to work - so thank you to everyone for your comments :D Although this isnt the picture I intended to make, this is the test shot for the floor reflections, I should be posting the main pic I wanted onto my gallery in the next few days.