CompuServe Thread

Greg, I've DL'ed your file Chip.3ds and done a bit of tweaking on the reflection mapping and other aspects of the file. The file is called Nchip.zip and I'll be ULing it to the 3D Studio library today. It uses standard maps shipped with 3DS. There were some real problems with your mesh. Where did it come from? It had some bad smoothing problems which raised havoc with the reflective materials. I smoothed it with the smoothing commands in 3DS. Also, the scale of the mesh was very, very small in the 3DS environment. This can also make for less than adequate refmap sampling. This file shows the technique for using a highly detailed refmap to get some more "reflections" in flat surfaces using spherical reflection maps. It is the one with the Granite.cel in the material. The other technique I illustrate here is the "non-automatic" cubic reflection material, in which you use a pre-made .cub file for your reflection map. Because it is mapped differently than a spherical map, it can have very acceptable results when used with flat surfaces. This example uses the standard medit.cub which is used to visualize an automatic cubic environment map in the materials editor. You can experiment with your own maps if you wish… These examples are meant to be a basis for learning and experimentation. There is much that can be done in terms of dialing in more realism. I advise a thorough re-reading of all the tutorials regarding reflections so you may be able to use each type to it's fullest capacity. Please keep in mind that the illusion of reflection using a scan-line renderer depends largely on giving the viewer a reflective effect that they would expect to see in a given situation. Therefore, it is wise to place the object in an environment, and use a shot (or shots) of that environment for the refmap if possible. Hope this helps you out some, -Alan