Having seen _dodger's mini tute on metallics the other day, I decided to combine it with my attempts to get realistic (ish) water in Poser. So far, the reflection side of it is a dismal failure. I replicated _dodger's settings for chrome, using a super huge flat plane I built from the Ground prop and remapped. I can get a texture on it no prob, but can I bugger get a reflection map to show as anything but a vague smear, not at all like _dodger's crisp reflections. Please help before I throw my fecking computer out the window. Not recommended, cuz it's damn cold here.

Anyone? Pretty please.

Show me an example. Render with a flat white so I can see the material, as well as a copy the way you're trying to do it, and I'll see what I can come up with. Notes that may help in advance: If you're doing a water surface, remember that you're gonna be reflecting the sky and all that's above it. Thus, for instance, a puddle in a coniferous forest might do well with a detained skyscape with very low silhouettes of pines at the bottom edge, for instance. If you're doing the inside of a bathtub, a simplified tile wall and ceiling might be best. A reflection map is basically mapped to a sphere and then projected downwards onto the surface to reflect. Water, like glass, would 'Multiply through lights' else you could enmd up with quicksilver. Also the reflection strength will probably not go above 50 and the hghlight strenght would be <90, probably around 50=60 A bump map will warp the reflection just like an actual change in the surface. Uhm, let me amend that -- if you use P4 on a PC and you don't make the bumpmap by hand or invert the green channel on it, it will look weird but will probably be okay on a water surface anyway.

Thanks, _dodger. I'll explain first, picture in a while... At the moment, I'm not trying to get the actual reflection, I'm merely trying out a previously rendered image to see if the idea works. For the sake of experiment, I duplicated the material settings you suggested for chrome, used on a flat surface. I made a flat prop with 160,000 (yup, you read it right) polys so that I can get ridiculously fine detail in ripples when using a wave deformer. Pics in a while.

Hmm, okay... here's the thing... that's not gonna work. Err, sorry. It's the way reflection maps are applied in Poser. Imagine a big hugs sphere around the entire scene. Now imagine that that sphere has a texture applied to it -- your reflection map in reverse. Now imagine that the sphere is used as a backwards planetarium projector, projecting IN instead of out. That's pretty much how it works. The problem you're encountering is that a flat surface isn't going to reflect a lof of o'l Ziggy there. Aside from which your colour is waaay to pright for effective reflecting. Try darkening it. A lot. You might see some of Ziggy's features. But I'd do this instead: make a secondary transparent layer above that and apply the image to it as a texture AND a transmap. It might do more what you're hoping for. I did't realise you were trying to reflect a specific picture. If your plane is facing directly up, you're probably reflecting part of the top line of pixels in your image just fine. Of cours,e that would be white. And Ziggy Played Guitar....