I hadn't rendered much in the line of reflections for a while, and I don't know if something is glitching with my system, but since installing PP2014 a few weeks ago, I've been having difficulties with rendering reflections. Even an old scene didn't work properly.

I did manage to get good reflections from a dresser mirror set by Dreamland Models & Bagginsbill, so obviously it does work.

But what are the proper material settings for a very basic mirror shader with real reflections (I'm assuming where PP2014 is at now)? I don't want to use the complex BB shader everywhere, just a simple set of a handful of nodes that can render reasonably quickly: good reflections with maybe some fresnel.

Does anyone have some Advanced tab material screenshots to share? I'm trying to figure out if something is wrong with my system, because this seemed very easy before....

A basic mirror would be a reflection node plugged in Reflection with Reflection Value =1, no diffuse, no specular, no transparency. 

But Reflections take their time, especially if you use blurred reflections. Reflection uses Ray Tracing, and thats not speedy.

For Fresnel, use the Fresnel Blend to seperate the reflective part. 

Sorry, no time for screen shots right now.

Thanks, Bantha. I always use raytracing. I don't see anything in your description that I haven't been doing...

It might be easier if you were to post a screencap of your node setup + render settings + a render, and then we could possibly narrow down what's happening.

Dumb as it my sound, depending what is behind the camera....don't do like idiot me did once and about pulled what little hair I have out by pitching the camera in such a way the the reflection of V4 in front of the mirror was reflected off to the side because was using a black sphere over the scene and the camera angle was such that it didn't see V4's reflection in the mirror. IE the black background was showing up in a black mirror which made me think the mirror wasn't reflecting. It was purely a poor camera angle on my part that was the problem.

Quote - Thanks, Bantha. I always use raytracing. I don't see anything in your description that I haven't been doing...

Bantha listed what you must do and you've agreed.

Now the next step would be for us to list the 10,000 things you must not do, and we aren't going to.

Examples:

Point your camera away from the mirror.

Point your mirror into a black object.

Point your mirror into space.

Turn on Reflect_Lite_Mult

etc. - not going to do that - it would take all day.

Show your shader. If you did as described (Reflect node in Reflection_Color, Reflect_Value = 1, all other values 0 or off) then it would work.

Yeah, I didn't make any of the mistakes you listed. And in one case, I had the scene working earlier, although it was several years old.

I don't think I have the shader anymore, because I was trying to change it and ended up just using settings from the Dreamland dresser mirror. But obviously I want to figure out what's going on.

I'll see if I can find some time today to try again. I've got a lot on my plate at the moment.

I do have two questions though:

What colour should I set the background in the reflections node? is this normally black, or does it depend on something else in the scene?

What exactly is Reflect_Lite_Mult for? is it good for anything, or is it basically a leftover from days of old?

1. when there is nothing to reflect, this Background is used. You can make it white and add a sky image in, or a Cloud fractal node with a sky and a cloud color. That saves you a dome around the scene (which BTW is the best thing to do)

2. Reflect_Lite_Mult is meant for image based (mapped) reflections, it dims the reflect intensity when diffuse gets less light. This is helpfull for car animations etc with reflection mapped chrome, driving through shadowy areas. When you don't do anything the reflections go far too bright in the shadows. For raytraced reflections, the light is dimmed from the scene itself. But when you have a mix...

So having a dome is the best.

Thanks, aRtBee. I try not to use fake reflections at all, and other than occasionally when testing/posing, I always use either a render room or skydome. So I guess the background colour is probably not relevant to what I'm doing?

Seems to be working fine in my present tests.

I should add that something else was going on earlier that made me think the problem was not just me: I would do a render, and the result was barely related to my present camera angle. For some reason, things were glitching in a fashion that they don't seem to be at the moment.

I still want to see a shader for a fairly basic mirror set up, with fresnel but not overly complex. Maybe as good as can be had in (say) 2–4 nodes. Something that will port nicely without too much resource expenditure.

Fresnel isn't for mirrors, but for stuff which looks like a mirror from the Side but not from the front. If you want a material with Fresnel, it would be helpfull to know what kind of material you have in mind - metal needs a different shader than Plastic does. 

And then things are getting complicated. You have reflections on a material that's not totally reflective. So, if you have any normal lights in the scene, you will need speculars too. If you have GI, the specular light should fit to the reflection used. 

Rendering engines like Luxrender or Blender's Cycles do have "Glossy" nodes, which handle reflection, speculars and diffuse - Poser does not. So if you want a glossy material with reflections, you need a reflection node, a diffuse node (either the one in the root shader or a seperate one) and a specular node, coupled to the reflection nodein a way that both do about the same, one for lights, the other for GI.

Hm. I don't think any mirror is "perfect" enough not to have a fresnel effect. I'm pretty sure BB's shader has it too (using almost my resources at the moment for a render, so can't check).

For now, I'm talking mirrors. KobaltKween has some nice base examples of other reflective shaders.

But for a mirror, I use reflection purely if it's not dirty or something like that. 

Cool, so the mirror seems to work for you.

here's one with less nodes. was gonna say that poser reflections usually look too dark, e.g. when reflecting hdri on envsphere, but in this case they look too brite.