'Milady,' said the droid, 'we *must* get you home. You're very intoxicated.' ''M'not intossi.. intissoc... antisoca... Um not frunk!' insisted Lady V. 'M'juss having fun.' 'You *are* drunk, milady. Your blood alcohol level is far too high, and compared to your current glucose levels you shouldn't even be awake. And you *shaved your head*.' 'Shaved heazz are all th'rage in.. in Bra-brazil. Y'see, thass whass wrong with you robotses, see,' muttered Lady V in return, with an air of sincere pride in her debating skills, 'you don' think ousside th' boskxs..ss. You 'ssume that me sstumblin' is cause 'm frunk busee, frunk... drunked is when you dranked too much alc-ch-ch-hol. I am way more than frunk! I rode a charge, an' I ate somathese new nano-nano--whatever agenss, they can keep ya feelin' gooood for a *long* time cause they goes with their liiittle ittybitty selves right into the ple-pleasure centre of the brain and give off these 'lectric dis--dis..' 'Discharges.' JICC finished for her, as Lady V slumped into a resltess slumber. 'Just what I needed.' This picture bears some explanation, as it's made as a mini-tut. Someone I was in conversation with rcently pointed out that my 'always the same reflection map' has exceptions. For instance, the way fabric reflects is different than the way metal and smooth surfaces reflect it. So I'll explain how the above image was done in a few steps.

First, here's the image strictly following my rule (only the reflection map is different, and I'll get to shat's different in a bit). This uses the same Starship_refl.jpg map as comes with my JICC figure, also applied to the fabric of most of the dress with the colours set as I've described before on chrome settings. It's successful in looking chrome, but it looks like hard chrome -- not soft and malleable like a dress should be.

So I tried it out with one of the smeary grey reflection maps that are so popular and that I usually warn against. The dress looked significantly better, but then there's a problem. The metals don't match. It's like having two mirrors which reflect different things. It's kinda silly. Unless one is a magic mirror, of course.

So the next logical step is to match up the droid with the dress's reflection map. Not having a MAT REFL pose for the smeary grey, this involves setting all those shiny materials to use the same reflection map as the dress now uses. But this sort of dulls JICC. Without the little sharp highlights in the reflection, it looks sort of bland.

The solution, which you can see in the first image, is to use a blurred reflection map made from the same map as applied to the hard metals. To do this, I loaded up starship_refl.jpg (it's in my JICC figure package) in Photoshop and applied a gaussian blur to it. Then I offset it (filter->offset) by half the width and height and blurrd out only the edge area that's now visible in the middle. That's to keep those edges from showing up as hard reflection edges. Then i offset it back so it again matched the original. This is the blurred map. I applied this ONLY to the *fabric* parts that I wanted to match the reflection used on the metals. All the rest of the reflections (the leather, gem, and silver) used the 'hard' reflection map. This could also be acheived with a VERY high res noise bumpmap, but that would slow the render unnecessarily, and a lot.

Here's an alternative, by the way. This one was done simply using Photoshop's Pixelate->fragment filter. This looks a little less like soft fabric, but gives a distinct lame look. Not lame. Lame. I'm not hunting for the accesnted 'e' in charmap for this. 'Luh-may'

This is the fragmented version.

BTW, feel free to save and use those two alternate reflection maps in your JICC 3000 or other renders.

JICC3k needs a hand here :P a left hand. the reflections look like fun to play with. adds to the realism to me.

Heha a tractor beam B^) You know darned well that there will be an expansion pack with a hand!

I know, just ribbin ya :P it's all good.

LOL, dodger, I love the story. :) Thank you for the mini-tut, it's very interesting. It's so nice of you to devote so much time and energy to helping people. Sue

No worries. As an artist, my purpose in life it to make the world a prettier place, be that through my own art or through providing tips to help improve others' art. B^)

Could you go into detail about reflection maps in general? What's wrong with the smeary grey maps, etc? Perhaps a new Reflection Maps thread? :)

I already have. Search this forum for the term 'smeary grey' and you will find the thread.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1066089

Here's one

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1080821

Here's another

Great thanks! Printing away. :)