I am having difficulty trying to get a mirror to reflect. I keep trying different color shades and everything seems to turn out the same. I've used glossy plastic, glossy metal. Well just about everything. Please help. I dont have much experience with the program and am still learning the ins and outsl

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=16922&highlight=mirror

Is possibly your best place to look.

Your scene lights need to be set to raytrace first of all, not shadowmap. The raytrace shader node also needs to be set to any color other than black, and have a value higher than 0. I usually use 30-50% for most surfaces, and maybe up to 60% for something very reflective like window glass. It's also good to set the reflective color to a non-white value, like a very pale gray for instance as most surfaces are not perfect reflectors.

A bit of a warning though, lots of reflective surfaces can bog down your system unless its fairly high end.

Quote - Your scene lights need to be set to raytrace first of all, not shadowmap.

Not true. the renderer needs to be set to ray trace (that is, 3Delight rather than OpenGL) but the lights don't require any particular settings. I'm not sure what you mean by the "ray trace shader node" - are you thinking of Poser?

Hello Trick,

I could not answer your question off the top of my head so I did a quick render and made a few screen grabs - here is a link to the 3 mirror pics.

http://artzone.daz3d.com/index.php?mode=people_card&p_id=5463

I will also PM you and talk and go into a bit more detail, hope you find it useful

John

I'm not sure what you mean by the "ray trace shader node" - are you thinking of Poser? Oops, I meant the advanced surfaces tab. Been playin in Eilir again.

Not true. the renderer needs to be set to ray trace (that is, 3Delight rather than OpenGL) but the lights don't require any particular settings.

Well, ok, that's true enough, but if TrickE76 wants shadows he at least needs to set the light parameter to shadow mapping. I recommended raytracing out of habit, as I use it exclusively.

You don't need any particular settings for lights, you don't even need lights at all as DAZ uses a default 'in camera' flash if you don't set up any lights. You do, however, have to use 3Delight renderer not OpenGL. Shadows are a seperate issue to reflections. I'm fairly new to DAZ|Studio and CG in general, so I had many settings to learn myself, so I made up a 'cheat sheet', I have attatched it to this reply. I hope you can make some use of it, I assume you have found the surfaces tab. Making a mirror is very simple, doesn't really affect render times and adds depth to a picture. I don't recommend making figure / body shapes into a mirror, I did this recently and a picture that took less than ten minutes to render went up to FOUR HOURS after I changed one figure into a mirror setting. Use reflection maps instead, you'll hardly notice the difference.