I'm 'house-training' a freebie road-roller, whose OBJ+MTL imported at ~50% original scale, auto-loaded its few textures. It has four material groups for the lights, which I've duly masked and made luminous using 'super-ambient'. It has a glass/glazing material, which I've tinted green for visibility, dialled to 'mostly' transparent.

So far, so good...

Then I noticed the wing mirrors did not reflect. They do not have their own material, they are part of the main vehicle.

After studying the UV map / template, I made a mask of the 'flective' portions. I've tried applying this, but only got 'sorta metallic / gleam'. There seems no way to set a masked area's reflectivity to 'mirror'. 

Without designating the mirrors' mesh as a separate group using 'grouping' tool, is there a way to mask the main model to make the mirrors 'mirror' ?? 

This is from side where you can't see the 'mirrors' don't: Superfly, 64 pix-samples, progressive, 2xGPU, 1024 vols & buckets...

--

No big deal if not, as I hope to split model at 'pivot' to allow steering and, even if I cannot hinge open the door, I should be able to split out the mirrors... 

Which Cycles option are you using?  You can use the Grouping Tool to paint out the mirrors and give them their own zone, or, if they appear in the UV, assign a material zone to them.  What you want to do is make the mirrors behave like mirrors with a high metallic value and very low roughness.

It's doable. Here's an example. The mask is for the flag while the rest of the ship is reflective. That's reversed of what you want to do.

A more rudimentary example than Red's... cube has one material.

UVs and mask

Mat

Render

Not even sure if mine is properly set up but I just winged it as an exercise lol. Tinkering is how I learn these things. We don't really have a Bagginsbill to guide us through these things any more. Complex mats aren't my strong suit. Seems to work though.

Thank you, thank you.

I'd got part-way, then went astray in the zoo of options. To put it politely, Poser's complexity is again out-flanking my wits...

D'uh, faced with documenting and 'sanitising' an arcane analysis system at work, I ended up creating a big wall-chart. You looked along the bottom for your task, then back-trailed the menu tree to 'Known Space'. Every-one laughed, but had to admit my map was much better than the manual's dozen free-standing example 'recipes'...

My Apologies.

I have, almost by accident, found the 'wacro' tools in Materials room (advanced).

Had read of such in manual, had looked for them several times, thought lack was something to do with now-lost Python facilities...

Using the Reflection option, can now one-click materials into mirrors, though Poser does keep trying to render with Firefly instead of my preferred Superfly.

Will see how plays with masks etc...

The wacro was never updated for Superfly although some of the shaders might work out the box.  

Box and single-side square are Poser primitives. OBZs located, un-packed to OBJs and UV-mapped. For each, invoke 'Reflection'. Delete the two subsidiary nodes. Add new node, 2d-textures, image map. Connect this back to reflection value. White reflects...

I don't know where/how that vertical black line got in, am hunting source. Also 'freckles' etc.

FWIW, Anime Girl is a budget ($), lowish-poly, FBX_7.4 VR-Chat Avatar which, to my surprise, 'plays nice' in Poser. Single rig, posable etc etc !! Apparently rigged in Blender, so have contacted author to ask *how* was done...

Now for brunch...

That Reflection value looks extremely high to me.  Consider that the value of 1 for that channel is equal to 100%.  TBH, I would look for another workaround if you are going to use the Superfly render engine.

Thank you.

Value of '1' works, but I was curious, by analogy of dialling 'Super-Ambient'...

Texture strength should be 1 also. I'd have to agree with hborre's assessment. Not sure why you just don't use metallic 1 roughness 0 with Superfly. Reflect is a Firefly hack, though it works just fine... in Firefly.

If I were you I would create a new material in a modeler or use the grouping tool to create one, since the simplistic Superfly set up I showed was lacking for some reason, for the reflecting bits of the model. You're going to have to deal with your "prompt migraines" eventually to move further on the path you're traveling, because that's where it's leading. Forest from the trees ;)

Not to be a smart ass either, lol, but also consider posing your figures a bit more dynamically. I've noticed they always have their arms slightly rotated and that's it. In like every image you make. Might as well just leave them in the T Pose as that slight nod toward posing just looks awkward rather than adding anything to image dynamics and composition. No really, it's called Poser. Posing figures is very fun :)

Thank you for your thoughts: Much appreciated.

I should point out that my posts are mostly 'Test Pieces', experimenting with imports, scaling, texture-conversion, FX etc etc. And, yes, having fun...

I began using Poser (P3 !!) as an architectural visualisation aid. My semi-pro CAD suite had proven unable to furnish a sprawling 'Caravanserai' project's Medieval-ish rooms beyond rudiments, or handle figures beyond flats and very-low-poly static mannequins. Happily, those 'CAD', 'Home Design' and 'Poser' packages all liked 3DS, so I could port, tweak, port etc. P_3, then P4 provided in-room 'Level of Detail'...

Happens I began using CAD after the square desert 'castle' where I'd set a fantasy tale sorta-grew a fifth corner. Oops !!

I'm no 'visual artist', scene figures merely supply scale, serve as place-holders. For me, the important factor for figures is may pose, should need arise, hence my running battle with FBX rigging woes...

IMHO, is getting harder and harder to do the just-beyond-simple things in Poser, and P_12's cruel culling of Material Room 'Basics' is not going to help.

Scene Luminaires ? Gotta jump through flamin' hoops to light them, and they have an undocumented maximum surface brightness...

I've now learned several work-arounds.

Mirror-surface ? There's no obvious 1-click solution, just uncertain, twisty paths through thick jungle, instead of a 'topographic map' with trails and fords marked.

I'm currently collecting mirrored freebies, intend to use them as trig-points to build that map...

Back before you needed immense libraries and run-times to even say, 'Hello, World !', I used to code in BASIC and 6502 Assembler. We had 'Top Down' and 'Bottom Up' programmers. Both types thought my self-taught approach weird, for I began in middle with core algorithm, spiralled outwards...

Reflections are quite easy to set up in poser super fly and can be done with limited nodes. Here is a simple render with 3 planes as mirrors, a pyramid for something to reflect, and an environment sphere for an environment and to help with lighting.

Here is the scene setup. There's one point light off to the side

And here are the shaders I used for the 3 mirrors going from left to right in the scene

As you can see, none are complicated. The most involved was the Firefly one. None include masks. If you want those, it does go beyond basic so there will be a few more nodes depending on which root node you want to use but is still not to the point of being difficult.

OT but.

NikKelly, have you ever considered posing your exotic format figures in XNALara and exporting from there as obj and importing into Poser as static props? It works like a charm for ripped game models and such (epidemic proportion amounts of those available, some, nay, alot of them gorgeous). Just a matter of scaling, translation, and connect the relevant maps to image map nodes. Thus you can skip the whole FBX thing if you want model/figure variety in Poser simply as furniture. Some of the game engine transparency maps translate strangely to Poser but you know this. Anyway, XNALara seems like something that would be right up your alley... it's quite feature packed also as far as manipulation options. Also CATS Blender plug in would probably be very useful to you also but you mentioned that you don't care for Blender...

https://github.com/absolute-quantum/cats-blender-plugin

https://xnalara.forumotion.com/t327-xna-posing-studio-11-8-9-view-mode-edition-release-189

XNALara requires a couple simple hoops to get up and running but I was really surprised by the nifty little software. 

Hope those links don't TOS violate. Nothing commercial there and I've tested both linked and found them quite well made.

Anyway.

Reposting RP's post to sublimate the interruption. Very good and succinct instruction there...

RedPhantom posted at 10:56 AM Tue, 25 January 2022 - #4433762

Reflections are quite easy to set up in poser super fly and can be done with limited nodes. Here is a simple render with 3 planes as mirrors, a pyramid for something to reflect, and an environment sphere for an environment and to help with lighting.

Here is the scene setup. There's one point light off to the side

And here are the shaders I used for the 3 mirrors going from left to right in the scene

As you can see, none are complicated. The most involved was the Firefly one. None include masks. If you want those, it does go beyond basic so there will be a few more nodes depending on which root node you want to use but is still not to the point of being difficult.

Thank you.

I'm sorry, there's something weird about the UIs in Gimp, Blender (BfA), DS, XNA & Unity that give me a prompt migraine. 15 mins exporting one (1) DUF from DS is my limit, but I can spend many hours with Poser, TurboCAD, 3DOC, PMX Editor, Noesis, Irfan View etc etc...

FWIW, guided by forum, I built myself a nice MT5 reflection texture per my ABCDEF example above. The map field lets me tailor it...

Superfly test-render, not enough pixel samples to fill out the freckles:

I've recently found several figure-makers whose FBX rigs 'play nice' with Poser, even to some animation !! Latter was definitely 'Rigged in Maya' which, given its seat-price, probably licences full Autodesk FBX SDK. Another claims to have rigged in Blender. I've sent him a query, requesting clarification of his work-flow. Either he was improbably lucky with the ever-changing Blender and I/O plug-in versions (*), or he's got a workable route...

*) I've two similar figures from another artist, made and rigged in Blender with 'identical' work-flows, just several weeks apart. First is fine, second shatters. Both Blender and its I/O plug-in updated slightly between them, breaking that brief Poser compatibility...