Ray-trace material for reflections

This is a very basic intro to creating an opaque [non-transparent] Ray-trace material. There are 2 approaches.

First method is to put a fall-off in the reflection slot.

Start by giving your material the desired color. I am choosing a bright red. Don't use any spcular level or gloss, and no self-illumination.



Put a falloff map into the reflection slot



Make the falloff Fresnel and set the top slot to a raytrace material.



Set up your reflection cards

Apply your material so for to a teapot. Make it about 16 segments.

Now the critical thing with all reflections is we need something to reflect.

Add a smallish plane over your object to provide reflections ... make a plane with normals facing down and these object properties:

This plane object needs a special material called output:

Make RGB level 3.0

Self illumination 100

You will now clone these little panels an position them here and there to reflect light onto the teapot.

So far here is our render. See those little edgey white splotches? Those are called artifacts and we need to get rid of them. The trick is to find the best method that does not drive up your render time.

One way it to super-sample. this is on the parent level of your material down near the bottom. Turn of global settings and select one of the drop-downs.

That helps and the render is relatively fast.

Try another approach. Here we will turn off the supersampling and turn on ray tracer. the basic idea is, you can work with these settings to tweak your results. This is as far as we want to go with those for now.

The other method is to use Raytrace from Standard button.

Go Standard/Raytrace

In the REFLECT slot of the Raytrace, we need to add another falloff ... same idea as the Fresnel falloff above ... this one we are going to set the to a 2.5 index of refraction ...

Back up to the raytrace ... change spec and glossy ... and change diffuse to red like the teapot in the previous example:

Set the specular and gloss to a high peak:

Here is our render with ray-tracing off, and super sampling also off. That's pretty nice for the lowest level of quality.