Reflection's theory

[hidr]

I am using Autodesk Viz 4.0. I am trying lately to have acceptable reflections in certain projects but there is something wrong. Do you know any books, posts, htmls or documents that are related to reflection's theory?

 

I recently found somewhere at the net a pdf that meets my current needs but I cannot find it now. (it was containing math types and explained every type of reflections)

 

Thank you

[AJLynn]

I am using Autodesk Viz 4.0. ...

 

That's the problem, Viz4's renderer is... how to put this... underachieving. The best reflections people get with it are done in post, Photoshopped in.

 

What do you mean by "reflection's theory"? I thought the only theory that was important was "angle of incidence = angle of reflection" - everything else (curved mirrors etc) comes from that. In Viz you can set an amount for your reflection, which controls blending with the material's diffuse map and/or transparency - if you make a red material with 50% reflecting and 50% transparent, you get a blend of red, the reflection and what's behind, which would probably be ugly.

[hidr]

I don't think its that simple. Just look at te following link.

 

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/ aniso_ref/aniso_ref.htm

[AJLynn]

These are just more complex cases of "angle of incidence = angle of reflection" that are complicated by the geometry of the reflecting surface. A lot of renderers will generate this effect using shaders - mental ray, Brazil and C4D all make it pretty easy - but I don't think Viz4 has it built in. You might be able to get it using bump maps like the one in that tutorial applied to a reflective material. I never really tried to do this in Viz4. The effect on the CD is caused by an extremely fine grained reflective material having rings of extremely small points etched in it by lasers, and it's very difficult to get in a render. There are also effects the you get from a multilayered material where the layer above is transparent with a bit of reflection and the bottom layer is transparent, like car paint, and you can get a refraction effect thrown into the mix. Still, the reflecting all comes down to angle of incidence = angle of relection, if you get that part you can make all these effects (though a lot of them are difficult if you don't have a shader that "just makes it work").