I found an ehow article, which got me sorta close.

http://www.ehow.com/how_4493510_make-floor-poser-reflective.html

I also found BagginsBill's thread on fresnel which is kinda overwhelming, and seems to be more for shaped objects than a floor (but I could easily be wrong).

I did a black floor which didn't come out too bad. But a colored floor not good at all.  What got me the most progress from the e-how instructions was to set the reflection background color to black, rather than white.  For the blue, it didn't work so well.

What now?

Attached Link: Wipeout for X15: Killed

Laurie

Thanks, I'll give that a try. 

Quote - Thanks, I'll give that a try. 

What is your goal here? What end result are you trying to achieve? Careful or too much experimentation will make ten hours go by lol.

The original looked real good.

LOL.  Thanks Zanzo.  I thought the black reflection looked pretty good, but some experts here could probably make it look better.

With a colored floor I was really lost.  Not as simple as switching black out for the desired color.  See the link above to the work from Shana & outoftouch, IMHO the reflection on the blue looks great.

Then use your blue floor if you think it looks great ;). All that matters is that YOU like it :).

Laurie

I think my blue floor sucks...  I'm trying to get the floor like Shana & outoftouch's.

***Quote - Then use your blue floor if you think it looks great ;). All that matters is that YOU like it :).***Laurie

This is okay if you don't plan on generating any kind of revenue.

Quote - I think my blue floor sucks...  I'm trying to get the floor like Shana & outoftouch's.

I don't have that great of an eye but your blue floor looks just like hers. Both the black & blue look great.   Maybe you could lessen the reflection strength of the blue just a tad, but other than that it's nice.

another thing to consider is render time of the reflective surface. Id drop the ray trace quality of the reflect node down to (.1). I use this with floors and even eyeballs and I cant tell the dif in quality but the renders are faster for those mats.

If you are just talking making a render, consider rendering the reflection in a separate pass and comping that with the main render in a paint program.  That gives you flexibility in how much reflection, the color cast, and even allows you blurry reflections without tying up a whole bunch of render time in experiments.

If on the other hand you want to do it all "in camera," a couple things to keep in mind.

First, that bit about the fresnel shader is right on.  Bagginsbill would (and has!) explained in a lot more detail and a lot more accurately but basically most reflective surfaces aren't the same reflection at all angles.  Take a window pane.  Looking at it dead on, you usually can look through it.  Look at a sharp angle, and usually all you see is reflection.

Cheap way to do this is by plugging an Edge Blend node into reflection value.

Next, reflection is, well, light.  If it is reflecting more, then it should diffuse less.  If you leave the diffuse value up and turn up the reflection, you make a surface that is too bright.

Third is blurry reflections.  Most surfaces are not optical-grade mirrors.  The trouble with the Blurry Reflection setting in Poser is it gets really spotty if you don't use a high reflection quality.  Which, incidentally -- a quality of .2 is perfectly acceptable for a non-blurry reflection.  You only need to get up to .6 and above if you are using a lot of blur.  And this slide more than any other single slider impacts your render time!

Okay, fourth is background.  Reflective surfaces reflect what is around them.  If you have a floor and a prop, then most of the look of the floor will be the background color of the scene.  Which can be really boring (and not look realistic).  Often you get a more interesting -- though not always realistic -- result by plugging an image into that background color slot in the reflection node.

That image will be applied to the UV coordinates of the reflective object, however, unless you add one more node.  Plug a "lighting-environment-spherical" into the background slot of the reflection node, and plug your image into that.  That will apply it to an imaginary sphere surrounding the scene.