CompuServe Messages

Anthony, there are at least a dozen different ways of getting text to look reflective. They include: First, a bevel is important to make text look metallic. – always put a bevel on the text (remember my recent trick I relayed here on the forum about always beveling above the 0 line. bring the entire bevel up above 0, and then bevel in to 0 and it should be much easier) – the bevel should be rounded if possible Second, the side faces should have more reflection blur than the front faces. Third, there are alot of different ways to treat the front faces: – use a hi-res (at least 700-line) 24-bit map with alot of color in it. Alan Iglesias recently wrote about this for 3D Artist. He can describe this technique to you in more detail. – use a flat-mirror on the front faces, and reflect an object whose normals are facing towards the object, but away from the camera (so the camera can't see it). Texture map a blurry version of the refmap on that object. You can then rotate and move the "reflection object" and the reflection will move on the text. – use an auto-cubic reflection map for the front faces. This has reflection blur control built-in, and can provide spectacular results. I'm sorry that I don't have more time to get into details and more techniques, but perhaps some of the other folks here can contribute to this thread. I'm in the middle of a zillion deadlines at the moment. – G