Reflections Part One

Overview

You just finished your photo-realistic model of a car. You have asigned a blinn shader and you've cranked up reflectivity 100%. You're all set in mental ray with raytracing. You hit render and your car looks matted, no reflections.
(NOTE  This is a beginner's tutorial. Most average Maya users will have already learned to use this concept)

The reason for this happening is that your car has nothing to reflect. In this set of tutorials you will learn how to make a perfect reflection in Maya.

Set-up

Open Maya and create a new scene. Your menu set should be rendering and your shelf should be rendering as well. Import the test model at the bottom of this tutorial. It will be needed to follow the instructions exactly, but you could easily use your own model.

Now go to create-polygonal primatives-plane. Scale it up so that it is large enough for the robot to sit comfortably on top of.
(NOTE  You may have to move the plane down so it is sitting underneath this model, not intersecting it.)

Select the model.

With it still selected create a blinn shader from the rendering shelf. This will automaticlly asign it to the robot

The attributes editer should automaticlly open. Roll down till you find reflectivity and set it to 1.00

Open up the render settings window. On the render using roll-down menu, set it to mental ray.
(NOTE IMPORTANT From now on mental ray shall be refered to MR and the render settings should be refered to as RSW.)

Render it. The results you will see will not be much different than what you usually get. In RSW click the tab mental ray
(NOTE The tutorial will get tougher here so follow the instructions carefully)

Set the render settings to as followed. Set the render production.

• Ray tracing=yes
• Final gather = yes (This will calculate the amount of light you have in this scene. For example, doors, walls, etc.)
• Under the raytracing tab
• Shadows=3
• Under the final gather tab
• Acuracy=200

Create a directional light. Rotate it so it is shining down on the robot. Go to the attributes editer(make sure it's selected). Find the shadows tab. On the raytracing attributes check the use raytrace shadows. This will make sure that raytracing is used for the generating of shadows.