CompuServe Thread

David, Oops! I played with this one and it looks like what happens is that with atmosphere turned on (fog or Distance cue) the box IS reflected in the sphere, but the renderer is ignoring the object material and is making it the same color as the fog color. I did this: – Create an L-sphere and a box in front. Create camera and omni light. Assign blue plastic to the box and a pure auto reflect material to the sphere. Should render fine. – Set up camera ranges so both objects are inside ranges (to keep object colors clean). setup a yellow fog and turn it on but leave the fog background button off. When rendered I got a black sphere reflecting a pure yellow box (even though the box is blue.) Go back and turn on the fog background and when rendered all you should see is a mirrored ball reflecting a yellow box against a yellow background, in other words, a solid yellow screen! I think this is the same for distance cueing only your seeing the box reflection blend into the black background. I only played with fog, but tried different materials and settings, all with the same effect. Sounds like a creepy crawly to me. A big hairy mean one! <g> David

Certainly, David, the reflections don't work the way I would expect them to under this situation. If you turn the "far" down from 100%, the reflections _do_ start to appear. However, this would seem to be inconsistent with the defined camera ranges for the distance cueing; if the distance between the reflective object and "reflectable" objects in the scene is equal to or greater than the defined camera ranges, the distance cue should act accordingly. To put it simply, I would expect the "camera" that "shoots" the six cubic reflection maps (for the reflective object) to exhibit the same range/distance cueing characteristics as the settings for the camera used to render the scene. If the reflective object *itself* falls into the influence of the distance cue (as seen by the camera), the object (and it's cubic materials) should be influenced accordingly. In my test, the camera ranges were *well* outside the perimeter including the camera, the reflective object, and the other "reflectable" objects. I'd guess that the distance cue, in a case like this, should have no effect on the reflections at all. This is as good as a analysis as I can come up with. I'll leave it to GaryY for the final word.