-I have enabled Mirror on an object which appears successfully in my render
image. I have put the lamp very near to this object, and find that
I am not obtaining a mirror surface with some reflection. What do I
do to fix this?
-With my mirror working, how may I obtain a “silver” mirror surface,
and not just a white mirror surface?
Zachary, It may help to see a screenshot so we can give more specific advice.
Are you using Blender Internal (which is usually the default) or Cycles for rendering?
One thing to check is the roughness value. Roughness should be at (or near) 0 for reflections. Below .1, you should be starting to get reflections.
-How do I alter the enables mirror property,
and some reflection actually happening,
given the very nearby light source?
-Is there a way to acheive a glass effect?
How do I do that? Is it just a combination
of Mirror and Transparency?
shaping.blend (638 KB)
For reflections to happen, you need to actually enable Mirror and crank up its reflectivity, but also need something to reflect. Your object faces the sky with literally nothing it could reflect. Unless it’s only the ground you wish to be reflective, not that shard, in which case it’s obvious it does reflect already.
Sun lamp cannot possibly be a “very nearby” light source. Sun lamp’s position is irrelevant, only its direction matters. And reflections of the lamps are not achieved with mirror, but with specular settings.
As for glass - yes, it’s a combination of raytraced transparency and mirror.
-So this means that you cannot have the Mirror effect
reflect the lamp? If I want lamp reflection, that’s a property
on the Material setting, and the Mirror one?
CG lights are per se invisible to reflections - that’s a shortcoming since the old age of computer graphics. To compensate for that, “specularity” was introduced as a means to fake the reflection of CG light sources.
You can crank up mirror values all you like, without specularity the highlights from lamps will not be seen on objects:
Thanks for the clarification on #6! The reflection property will not include the lamp itself by default,
or reflect much visually either. Until the [Specular] property is enabled and used.