How can I control what is reflected in a mirror? In the attached image I wanted a reflection of the figure in the mirror, or at least more than the tops of the candles, but I don't know what to change. I tilted the mirror more, but that didn't change much. Is it a light which has to shine in a direct line from the figure to the mirror? And if so, which light is the one that produces the reflection?

I'm very thankful for any help - if not desparate. ;)

Things that light have bounced off of.  You'll need to angle the mirror a little: and then light the back of your figure.  Look around for Sky Dome stuff if you really want a mirror to pop; becasue, as is, a Poser scene's outermost points have no geometry for light to bounce to/from.

Light has nothing to do with reflection. Refection is a triangle from camera to mirror to object (her).
Here,, the triangle is almost flat or a straight line and why her reflection is directly behind her.

The easiest way is to hide her body and put a primitive box where she was. Practice until the box reflects in the mirror.... Faster than loading the whole scene

You can move the camera with its xyz dials very easily if you don't want to shift your scene

Thank you very much! That helped. :)
I turned the mirror a little and now she's reflected in the lower half of the mirror.  Now I'll try to tilt the mirror or the camera to get the reflection higher. Good idea to try out the reflections with primitives before rendering the high res figures. I'm a little embarassed, that I didn't think of this. ;)

Hi !

As i see in the picture, the candles are reflected, your character too, but behind her !

Your mirror shows a shadow on it. That is impossible in real life.

You need to go into the material for the mirror and turn off Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult on the PoserSurface root node.

You should also have Diffuse_Value = 0 and Specular_Value = 0.

If a straight line from the figure to the mirror intersects the surface of the mirror at an angle of 30 degrees on the left side of the mirror, then a line from the camera to the mirror also needs to be at 30 degrees, but on the right side of the mirror. If the angle between the figure and mirror is 50 degrees then the camera needs to be at 50 degrees, etc. Put another way, the angle which the incident ray makes with the normal (a line perpendicular to the mirror surface) is equal to the angle which the reflected ray makes to the same normal.

Les,, you showoff..;)

Bagginsbill, I used the mirror material that came with Magic Mirror. Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult was off. But Diffuse and Specular was 1. Maybe that caused the shadow. For the testimage above I used the material settings like you said. There is no shadow now.

Lesbentley, it seems I needed a refresh course in optics. Richardson's explanations about the triangles, already teared at the cobwebs in my old brain. Incident ray angle equals reflection ray angle  was called "Einfallswinkel = Ausfallswinkel"  in German. Long time ago in school I learned that...

Thank you all very much. This encourages me to learn more about lighting and material settings.

Thetis,

Excellent. You now have the physically correct mirror shader.

However, the reflection looks darker than it really is. The back side of your prop is lit less, and should be darker, but not that dark. That is because our monitors do not emit light in linear proportion. They are exponential. To compensate, you must do what is called gamma correction.

Are you using Poser Pro? If so, you should use the built-in gamma correction features.

In all other versions of Poser, it is possible to perform gamma correction with nodes, but it isn't trivial. And, unfortunately, you have to design every single shader you're using to be a gamma-correcting shader.

However - you can cheat a little. Just raise Reflection_Value a bit above 1. This is not a correct general solution, but it can be used in specific situations to good effect.

If you've no light, you've no render; if the back of her figure had'nt been lit(by a Poser Light) then would Her rear would have nothing to see from the final output..  Now let's talk about getting, said Light, Even!

If she's a vampire she shouldn't be able to reflect in the mirror :tongue1:

"If you've no light, you've no render"

Ummm. Bzzzzt. Wrong.

Here is a render. There are NO LIGHTS in my scene. The render is not black. In fact it is "lit" rather nicely, with shadows and specular highlights and everything you expect.

All done with shaders.

isn't that lit off the skydome I can see reflected ? so technically it's lit by ambient light I suppose (or posers version thereof)

Bagginsbill, I tried out your suggestions. I have Poser 7, so I raised the reflection value. With about 1,25 it looks better(lighter) and white reflected objects don't get overexposed.

Thinking of your point about rendering without lights, I tried to lighten the background of the reflection with clouds (image above). This may look right in some situations. But the blue and white objects were still too dark. So I removed the clouds and put a backlight between mirror and objects and pointed it at a flattened (invisible) cylinder, that cuts through the objects. This lights up the whole mirror not only the reflection, but I will try this out with a full scene.
Thanks again for your help. Till now I mostly solved problems the quick and dirty way, very often in postwork, but this waked up my ambitions to wrestle more out of the Poser features and out of me.

But but but ... You have Reflection_Lite_Mult turned on! You're going to confuse the crap out of yourself there. The reflections are now multiplied with the amount of direct light hitting the mirror. Every time you adjust lights, they will alter the effective value of Reflection_Value - they should not.

Quote - isn't that lit off the skydome I can see reflected ? so technically it's lit by ambient light I suppose (or posers version thereof)

When I say "lit" I mean diffuse and specular reflections of a light source. Poser LIGHT objects. I have no Poser light objects.

And Poser "ambient" channel is nothing. It's the same as the Alternate_Diffuse channel. Whatever you plug into it, it renders directly.

I suppose I've confused the issue by including reflections of my sky dome. But that isn't lighting - that is reflection.

Look at the props carefully. They are not evenly bright like ambient would do. They show variation in brightness, just as if a light was shining on them and you were using Diffuse and Specular. What I'm saying is that I have no "lights" in this scene, and yet I have a render that looks "lit". I did it by using shader nodes that are effectively doing the same thing that the Poser lights do, but without actually using any lights. So - there is no "light" in my scene. I just have glowing props, but they are glowing in a pattern that looks the same as that produced by diffuse and specular reflections from a light source.

The technique involves using the N node (normal) to find out which way the surface is pointing. Then, with that information, it is possible to figure out how much the surface is pointing at an imaginary "light", and calculate how much light would bounce off the surface.

Ahh I think I see what you are getting at Bill.  To me it looks a bit like what happens when you use a pure HDRI atmosphere in Vue and delete the sun - that's what I meant by ambient, I should have been more precise.  Nifty trick though

Quote - But but but ... You have Reflection_Lite_Mult turned on! You're going to confuse the crap out of yourself there. The reflections are now multiplied with the amount of direct light hitting the mirror. Every time you adjust lights, they will alter the effective value of Reflection_Value - they should not.

Got me. That was a glitch. I tried out many different settings yesterday. so when I made the screenshot, I caught a wrong setting.