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FEEBLEMIND

Tutorial: reflections

In the past, Blender used EnvMaps (environmental maps) in order to simulate the reflectiveness
of objects. But this way was quite difficult, needing the use of Empties (null objects) and layers
when a simple reflecting plane was needed. Fortunately, including Raytracing into the renderer
eased the whole process and helped to achieve a greater realism.

For Blender: 2.48a - Version française disponible

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Preliminaries

As well as anything related to raytracing with Blender, because of the supplementary calculus
time required by your computer, raytracing is only an option that you should feel free to activate
and deactivate. This is done by the mean of the Scene menu (F10 key). The Render tab shows
a button labeled Ray you will have to activate in order to use raytracing in your pictures. If you
do so, you can deactivate the EnvMap button, even if this one shouldn't bother you if you don't.

The Mirror Transp tab

This tab is divided into two parts, the first one being about reflection (Ray Mirror) and the
second being about transparency(Ray Transp). We will pay attention to the first one, here.
When activating the Ray Mirror button, you can make use of reflection options for the shader of
your object. Its surface will reflect its environment at rendering time; the other buttons and sliders
are here to help you controling this reflectiveness.

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RayMir:

By default, this value is set to 0.00, which is no reflection at all. By increasing this value up to the
maximum (1.00), your object will have the same reflectivity as a perfectly polished mirror. Please
note that the reflected colors are strictly those of the original environment, whatever is the base
color of your object.

Depth:

In our reality, reflecting objects located near each other will reflect themselves up to infinity, and
it is possible to spot in the reflects of one, the reflects of the others. Unfortunately, this behavior
will require an infinite time of calculus to reproduce. Most of the time, you only need a recursivity
level of two or three to get visually attractive results; because of this, the default value is set to 2.
Beware: if you foolishly increase the value of this parameter, you will suffer from from drastically
longer rendering time if you have many reflective objects in your scene.

Fresnel:

Let's undertake a small experimentation in order to understand this parameter. After a rainy day,
go out and stand over a puddle of water. You can see the ground under the puddle. Now, please
kneel just in front of the puddle, your face close to the ground, and look again at the puddle of
water. The liquid surface part which is closer to you lets you see the ground, but if you move
your glance toward the other end of the puddle, then the ground is gradually masked until all you
see id the reflection of the sky. This is the Fresnel effect, and this option sets how much of the
surface is effected by it; with a 0.0 value, the surface is 100% reflective, even if the casual
observer is glancing from above, and with a 1.0 value, it shows only the natural shader of the
object.

Fac:

This option sets the intensity of the Fresnel effect.

Fresnel effect example

The animated picture below shows a glossy ground on which we will apply the Fresnel
Parameters: Fresnel 2.50 and Fac 1.35. It shows quite well the Fresnel effect: when the
angle of view of the camera is close to the angle of the horizontal plane, then we can
only barely spot the patters on its surface and on the counterpart, we see easily the
reflection of the sky on its surface. But when the camera is at the apex of the plane, it's
mainly its texture that can be seen.

Check the attached files in order to download the source file.

Fresnel effect demonstration

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Colored reflections

In the Shading menu (F5 key), the Material tab lets you define the color effects of three distincts
properties: Col simply colors your object; Spe rather gives a hue to the specular spots on the
object; finally, Mir gives a slight color to the reflexion of the object. By default, Mir is pure white,
which is quite perfect for chrome effects.

This way, if you'd prefer that your object looks like gold rather than chrome, then you will have to
adjust the Col, Spe and Mir properties more accordingly for such a material. Specifically, it is the
Mir parameter that gives a different hue to the reflections. Logically, Mir should be the same
components as Col, but as Blender is more orientated toward artistic freedom than realism, you
can set the colors the way you really want.

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The result is rather obvious:

Blurred reflections

A careful observation of the objects in our environment shows that glossy objects (reflective,
varnished, metallic, etc.) don't reflect the light perfectly, because of some roughness of their
surface, for example. The reflections then look more or less blurred. This is the very purpose of
the Gloss parameter: with a value of 1.000, the surface is perfectly reflective ; the lower this
value, the blurrer the reflections become. Click on the following pictures in order to witness by
yourself how the reflections on the ground loose their sharpness when the Gloss value
decreases.

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The Samples value sets the quality of the blur: high values will provide a very smooth blur but
higher rendering times. Thresh is the threshold that puts the sampling to a halt if the previous
sample doesn't contribute to the pixel at least at this value (as a percentage), even if the iteration
has not reached the set Samples value. Aniso allows for anisotropic blur to occur (when the
value equals 1.000) enlighting the direction of the surface's tangent ; with a null value, the blur is
perfectly circular. Anisotropy is especially useful for machined objects (lathed objects, for
example).

Max Dist sets the maximum distance a ray will travel in order to find a pixel to reflect ; once this
distance is reached, the pixel from which the ray has been emitted will herit one of the two
following colors (as set by the Ray end fade-out drop menu):

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Fade to Sky Color: the pixel herits from the color of the sky, as set in the World Buttons

Fade to Material Color: the pixel herits the base color of the material

This last option is very interesting for varnished objects that are reflective only over a short
distance.

Article written on December the 26th, 2004.

Updated on November the 17th, 2008 for Blender 2.48a. Comments re-initialized

Site : feeblemind Article : Tutorial: reflections