Reflection maps have mainly been used for adding effects of metal or shine effects but with a little experimenting they can probably be used for a lot more. I've used a reflection map to simulate fabric folds as I find it gives a more subtle and realistic result than bump maps and take up less memory usage. A bump map is usually much larger in size as it's converted to a .bmp type format by Poser while a reflection map can be a .jpg and sometimes not even directly mapped to the item in question but just a simple 200 x 220 image. Of course, if it's to be used for detail it would be best to make it on the uv template. Also useful is it's use to add spots of grime and dirt to make clothing all that more realistic. The reflection settings for the default P4 muscle shirt were : Reflective Color - white, Both "Multiply through lights" and "Multiply through object colour" were checked and the reflection strength for this in particular was 25% though I went into post and used some dodge and burn to bring it out more so maybe it should have been set higher. As I said, I'm still trying this out and once I've got fabrics (which are easier) done then I'll have a go at skin textures to add wrinkles, ageing, scars, etc. The skin texture I've used here is Joelegecko's new Jeff2K which has so much detail that nothing more is needed :) Would really like to get your feedback on this to see if I'm on the right track! Oh, and one last note, I've really messed up my monitor settings so please let me know how this image shows up, it should be on the dark side with strong contrasts and not overly saturated in colour. Is it so????

The image looks good on my monitor. A bit dark around the edges but I think it looks fine. But the effect itself is awesome. It actucally gives a used-well worn look. Something that is hard to pull off in poser. I'm going to have to try this tonight. Do you have anyother neat ideas?

That's a neat idea! It looks good here.

You can map reflections to the eyes. Want someone to have an outdoors look? Map a photograph to the outer eye level as a reflection (works in Bryce too) you can add reflection to the hair, at low settings it makes the hair "shine" with all that hyped tv advert health. etc etc. Poser like anything is only limited by your imagination and your ability to experiment.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Questor, those are some really nice ideas. The reflection of what the eye sees has been discussed before but I had no immediate use for it then and must have slipped my mind. Reflections on hair sound great too, could be a neat way to alter colour as well, thanks for the tips!

Reflection maps are mapped to a invisible sphere that surrounds the poser scene and then reflected back to the object that uses it, so using a object template on them is a waste of time. If you want to find out how Reflection maps work then turn off normal texturing and set the object colour to black, the image you see in the preview mode now is a near perfect rendition of how the reflection map will look when rendered, so you can just rotate and pose the model to see how the reflection is mapped onto the surface of the model. With normal (not pro) poser you can also do a lot of stuff with unconverted bump maps, the bum format is a bmp image so you can just rename any bmp to bum and use it directly in poser to add strange effects to models. Staale