I have been out to sea for the last week, so with no internet access to distract me, I began with messing with Miki's morphs, then hit on the idea to pose her in her bathroom.

The mirror that came with this bath set (the walls are not from the set either) wasn't up to par with what I wanted to do, so I started from scratch.

The first things I figured out is that a high poly count doesn't necessarily give you a decent reflection. This mirror is two primitive props: the primitive frame and the one sided square. Both were scaled to size, then I exported the frame to tweak it a bit in Wings.

Next came the mirror surface: I first made the Diffuse and Specular all black. Then I made the Highlights 0.0000000. I added the reflect node and plugged it into the reflection tab on the root node. I changed the reflection value to 1.0, then I tweaked the settings inside the node itself. Background color was left at solid black, the quality was ramped up to 20, softness was left at 0.0 (if you change this, it makes the reflection blurry), and I left the RayBias at default.

The results are above. It took about 4 hours to render this picture with IDL and SSS turned on.

Thanks for sharing ! What are your machine specs, please ?

I have a 4 year old core two duo with 4GB of RAM. But I am sure it's the quality setting on the reflect node that is causing it to take so long to render....

looks good,haven't played with mirrors in a very long time

Quote - But I am sure it's the quality setting on the reflect node that is causing it to take so long to render....

It is!  Quality 20 is insanely overkill! You will get an equivalent level of quality at values below 1 (anywhere between 0.5 and 1.0 is in my "Whoa! Only use for extremely detailed reflections!" range). You can actually get away on smaller reflective bits with going as low as 0.02. Obviouisly that wouldn't work too well for mirrors but for chrome bits (e.g., the legs of a stool, ornamental trimmings here and there on bits of furniture and other props), it works perfectly well.

Excellant render...Thanks for sharing info..

Is it just me, or the perspective, or is that a really big toilet?

You're right, the toilet looks monstrous.

nice reflection rokket, i guess when you are at sea for weeks on end, you really really need a large toilet :)

Well done.

Cool!

Quote - Is it just me, or the perspective, or is that a really big toilet?

Yeah, that was one of the issues I was referring to with the render. I was concentrating on the mirror and didn't think to look that the models I downloaded for free were actually scaled correctly.

Quote - > Quote - But I am sure it's the quality setting on the reflect node that is causing it to take so long to render....

 

It is!  Quality 20 is insanely overkill! You will get an equivalent level of quality at values below 1 (anywhere between 0.5 and 1.0 is in my "Whoa! Only use for extremely detailed reflections!" range). You can actually get away on smaller reflective bits with going as low as 0.02. Obviouisly that wouldn't work too well for mirrors but for chrome bits (e.g., the legs of a stool, ornamental trimmings here and there on bits of furniture and other props), it works perfectly well.

When I made my chopper I left the quality setting at the default and it worked just fine to make the parts look metallic. When I was working with this, I started at .02 and worked my way up to about 2.5. It was starting to look like a mirror at that point, so I went nuts and typed in 20. I know I could crank it back down, but the render is done and I won't be redoing it. When I go for a mirror in the future, I will set it much lower.

rokket, bagginsbill mentioned that current poser version(s) calculate reflection wrong using reflection channel, and instead recommended using alt_diffuse with reflection and blinn nodes.  I noticed your mirror darkens scene.  as I can't duplicate your scene and render with fresnel procedural, I can only suggest increasing raytracing/IDL quality/bounces and using GC, with view to less darkening, pending release of further info in re: reflection settings.

I recall the mirror-darkening issue arose earlier, and one of them may have addressed it already for the case of reflection channel with no GC.  like a glowing mirror or one with non-zero diffuse (both fake).

Looks really good to me!