Digital Art Zone

Is there a trick on creating mirrors? i can get an object to reflect images, but the reflection are too light and foggy looking.

There are different schools of thought about this. But last week I got my best results with diffuse black at 100 percent and then reflection white at 100 percent.

I was wondering about that myself. I’ll be giving that a try. TY

Reflection + Refraction + Diffuse must equal 1 (or in DS terms, 100%)...the exception to that rule is Diffuse set to Black (0,0,0)...100% Black is still 0.  Otherwise, you will get more ‘energy’ out of the reflection than goes into it, which is the most common cause of washed out reflections.

I got pretty poor results with anything other than diffuse at 100 percent doing testing the other day. That is for any situation where a color was wanted other than traditional silver mirror. I also suggest setting specularity at 0 for any flat surfaces like mirrors, but only flat surfaces.

DZFire’s Real Metals Tutorial explains reflective surfaces in DAZStudio and provides dial-spin recipes — for mirrors, his silver is perfect.  (You can find the old forum topic on this here.)  He later worked this data up into an easy-to-use product here.

I’ve been following maclean’s tutorial on the old forum the past few years with good results.

Tutorial —> http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=16922

Render —> http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2135680  Be sure to click to see it unsquished.

Edited to Add: Those settings work nicely in DS 2 and DS 3 advanced.  I don’t recall if I’ve tried a mirror reflection yet in DS 4.