I've been working with getting a realistic mirror image of a figure.  I've not been very successful at doing this.  Here are my problems

The reflected image is darker and more faded than the original unless the mirrored image background is completely black, then I can get both the image and the reflection to equal each other as it does in a real mirror.

Here is my setup, I make a rectange (cube) representing the mirror, in the material room I add a reflections node to the reflection color channel.

I place a light directly behind the mirror to light up the figure's back and balance both front and back lights, remove cast shadow from the rear light.  Now with that setup, everything looks good (except for the black background).  In order to get anything other than black, I place a rectangle (white wall) in front of the figure (non reflective).  Now that's where I get my problem-
I get the white background.  However the mirror image changes, gets darker and is more fader than before.

I've noticed that in other folk's images (most of them in fact).

I looked in the Poser tut .pdf and can't find anything nor can I find it in the reference manual.

Now I'm  very successful of making floors reflective (showing surroundings in the floor and of course the images are darker as they should be.

Why, because some of the quarks-the strange ones are absorbed  and the charmed ones are reflected.  Well,  ok, I made that up, all six of those little buggers are doing something all the time.  If one quit, we would be in serious trouble.  Jan

Post an exemple i dont understand sorry

This is cheating, but here's what I do:

Search FreeStuff and there is a very nice mirror there. Produces near perfect reflections. So, whenever I want a reflective surface, I load that up, go to the Materials room and copy all the settings. Then I load my rectangle (or whatever) and make the settings the same. Works every time.

Another approach is to search the forum here for a post bagginsbill did on making chrome reflective. It's an excellent tute and works brilliantly for chrome, or any real reflective surface. In his explanation, he says something like chrome (and mirrors) are more or less black unless they have something to reflect. It makes sense to me.

For the floor and other surface reflection, I copied settings from someone on the forum here to produce beautifully reflective floors. Search for Shiny Floors. Sorry, I can't remember who posted it, but it's excellent!

And I'm not near my poser stuff so I can't give you the values exactly. Hope it helps some.

I don't know what your workflow entails but here is a link which, hopefully, may help.

http://www.cocs.com/poser/reflectp5.htm

Of course, I am assuming that you are using a Poser version greater than 5.

Quote - Post an exemple i dont understand sorry

Okay, give me a few minutes to set it up---Jan

You may get results more to your liking if Instead of plugging the Reflect node into Reflection_Color, plug the Reflect into Ambient_Color.  Real mirror aren't 100% so you can use the Ambient_Value to control the amount of reflectivity.  You can do a similar thing using Alternate_Diffuse but you may want to add a node between the Alternate_Diffuse and the Reflect node to allow you to control reflectivity.

Actually, forget all that and try unchecking Reflection_Lite_Mult.  I keep forgetting that that is checked by default and messes up reflections

I did something and it works fine now but as usual,  I just don't know yet what I did.  If I uncheck that Reflection_Lite_Mult. box, the "wall" that is between the camera and the figure, that wall  is whited out.  With it in I see the "walls texture reflected in the "mirror".  Now that doesn't mean that when I do it again I won't uncheck that puppy.

I'm going to save this puppy and see if I can duplicate my problem.

When I find where my problem was, I'll post it here.  Thanks folks for your ideas.

Jan

In many cases where reflection and glossiness it concerned, Reflection_Lite-Mult can be left checked on.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2772892

I have almost completely forgotten about that thread.  Thanks for the reminder, BB.

 I just linked to it from the tutorialized thread so it's easy to find again :)

Thanks BB, that did the trick (sometimes I forget to change the background in the reflections node to white).  Jan  

Yay!