Introducing Maya® 2011

Reflections and Refractions

You can either map or raytrace reflections. As you saw in Chapter 7, creating a reflection map for an object is pretty simple. Simply assign a Phong, Phong E, Blinn, or Anisotropic material to your object, and make sure the Reflectivity attribute is greater than zero. Then, click the Reflected Color map button to add a texture or a file as a map to create the reflection. (See the axe project in Chapter 7 for more on reflection maps and shaders.)

To generate true reflections, however, you’ll need to enable raytracing in either Maya Software or mental ray for Maya. Mapping textures to the reflected color isn’t necessary when raytracing is enabled, because Maya reflects any objects in the scene that fall in the proper ...