I'm playing around with the Kreatybo Spiderman texture in the material room in Poser 7 and I was trying to make it's bump/displacement map reflective. Is this at all possible?

Use a reflection map. I think that works .

I've tried creating a reflection map/node. Perhaps I'm missing something in the execution.

Did you connect the same map in both channels (bump/reflection)?
Maybe jou have to set a Math (subtract) node for the reflection.

You can make a surface reflective, and its reflections will react to any bump you have on the surface. Is this what you mean?

You could also modulate the reflectivity using the bump map (maybe with some additional maths) plugged into the reflection value channel, although this does not make much physical sense. But neither does Spiderman! :O)

Can you show us your node setup?

You have no reflection at all on that material. The easiest way to add reflection is to use the "Add Reflection" Wacro on the pull-out menu on the right of the Material Room. Then you can start to play with different ways to control that reflection using maps, if you want to.

Apologies if you already know this next bit: you need to switch on Raytracing and have at least one raytrace bounce to see reflections in your render.

I had previously used the "Add Reflection" button on the Wacros menu. However, what was happening was that the base body map was reflecting as well. I feel that I'm close, but I'm willing to bet that I am missing one very small but crucial step. Every time I go to add a reflection, I first select the bump map I am targeting and then hit the reflection button. But what happens every time is that the BODY map gets the reflection added; thus making everything reflective.

The trick I was going for was to leave the base body map looking dull like natural fabric and the bump map shiny like a raised synthetic print on that fabric.

Ummm.. I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. It's not one or other of the maps that is reflective, it's the surface itself.

If you want any reflections at all off the surface, you have to use a Reflection node (although you don't have to plug it into the Reflection channel). Then you can control the colour and the amount of reflection at each point on the mapped surface using a colour map and/or a reflectivity map.

Okay. First you need to make the whole surface reflective. Plug a reflection node into the reflection channel, and set the Reflection Value to 1.

Then you need to use a mask in which the areas that you don't want to reflect are black, and the areas that you do want to reflect are white, or at least a light grey. You plug this reflection map into the Reflection Value channel.

It looks like you could use the bump map for this, but it's likely that the non-reflective areas are not pure black, so you will get some reflection still, and there is not a good contrast between reflective and non-reflective areas. To reduce the non-reflective areas to black (zero), you may have to subtract something from the bump map before plugging it into the Reflection Value channel. You can do this with a math subtract node, but you will have to experiment with the actual value, as it depends on the shades of grey in your bump map.

Shall I make up a screenshot of what I mean, or are you okay with this?

I've just had a different thought. Those areas on the body suit are not really showing true reflections, but only specular reflections. In other words, they are only reflecting diffuse light, and not objects in the scene.

You would therefore do better to use a Specular node (or Blinn) instead of reflection, and it would render much faster.

You would still need to use the map to control the reflective areas, but you would plug it into the Specular Value and not the Reflection Value.

This first render shows a marble sphere with largish specular highlights from two white lights. You can see the specular colour is white and the specular value is 1.0. (The sphere is actually reflective too, but it makes no difference to this exercise. Those highlights are not coming from the Reflect node, but from the Specular node.) Ignore the small spheres, they are from something else I was doing in the laboratory.

The next picture will show what happens when I use a greyscale image, such as a bump map, to mask these specular highlights.

You can see the masking effect. However, because the darker colour in the mask is grey, not black, there is still some specular highlight showing in areas where we don't want to see it, in between the brighter parts.

I'll fix this in the next picture with an extra node.....

However, subtracting 0.5 also turns the white areas of the mask into a mid-grey. So in order to keep the same strength highlights I have doubled the Specular Value to 2.0, as shown.

It looks like the Math node thing is doing the trick. Now, I'm just tinkering with different subtraction values.

Thanks for your due diligence and thorough explanations. I'll post a render once I'm happy with the tweaking.

Wow, that looks terrific! I like the way the underlying mesh also shows subdued highlighting here. Excellent!

I was going to suggest an alternative to using a Subtract node - a Gain node, which you could use to increase the contrast in the bump map on either side of a chosen mid-point. But this seems to be working very well, and a Gain node would probably lose some of the subdued highlighting of the mesh.