Reflections Part One
How Reflections Work
Now let's explain what the reflection really is. As we all know reflection is reflecting the object that is in the scene depending on the angle of view or the angle of the surface. To see this in a real life example go to http://www.mitsucars.com/MMNA/jsp/eclipse/08/index.do?loc=en-us
As you can see the eclipse has a bright high-light running down the side of the car. But it's really not a high-light. That's a reflection of most likely a light box in the studio.
In Maya we use similar techniques.Using a polygonal plane with a special material assigned to it. Then strategically moving it around the scene. Another big tip while working reflections in maya is to put your model inside a box. Therefor you can control how light or how dark the envirnment you work in is.
Now let's set up our reflecting planes (NOTE Reflecting planes are refered to as RP and they are really just polygonal planes with a material I will tell you how to create later)
Create a box and scale it so it encases the robot and the plane. Make sure you leave a lot of space around the objects.
Create a poly plane (RP) and put it on the left side of the robot just out of camera view. Create another one and put it on the right side of the robot just out of camera view. Now rotate them to a vertical position. They should look like the image below:
Now open up the hypershader by going to Window-Rendering Editors-hypershader. Click on the create Maya node and change it to create mental ray node.
Open the materials tab and create the node mib_illum_lambert. Set all of its attributes to white and rename it to RP_lambert. This will be the color of all the reflection planes.
Create another mib_illum_lambert and set its attributes to light gray. This will be the color of the box surrounding the scene.
Select the two reflection planes. Right click on RP_lambert and hit assign material to selected.
Select the box, right click on boxs shader, and hit assign material to selected.
Select the plane the robot is standing on and rename it FL (Floor Plane). Go to vertex mode on FL. Select the rear vertexes and pull it up over the robot's head and out of camera view.
This will become a backdrop.
Render. And there you have it. A basic light rig you can use for your high reflective applications. The robot should look like it has a high polish chrome finish.
In the final render I created an extra camera by going to create-cameras-camera. With it selected, I set the angle of view to 43.00 to help clip out the RP.