trying to create an effect from mirrors

i have 2 planes, slightly apart, the "back" one is the reflection, no other effects
the 2nd, the "front" plane, has the rest, highlight/shine/etc, shadows off for both
problem is the reflectiion is "running into" the shine on the front plane
don't want it to see that shine when reflections are calculated, solution?

Not clear at what you are aiming for. Can you post the .car file with perhaps a clearer job definition?

the 2 planes are spaced a bit more to make the effect more appearent

basicly i'm splitting the usual mirror design of 1 plane, into 2, trying to add a bit of "depth" to it, which you can notice in most any mirror, having reflection on the "back" plane, and rest of highlights/spec/etc on the "front" plane,which i should also add reflection to, but that comes later if i can fix this :)

problem is trhe "front" plane gets effects on them, then the "back" plane sees those when its raytracing the reflection, which i want it to not see them, and ignore the front plane totally

in poser i could make the plane "not visible" to any raytracing, but in carrara no such feature?

ack it wont let me post the file -.- lol

Try sending inside a zip file.  (Still can not picture your workings)

trying again as a zip :)

edit: nope didn't work lol

o well

He's trying to model a mirror the way that real mirrors are made.  Sounds like a cool challenge.  I don't know if anyone has ever modeled a mirror that included depth.  I'm sure it can be done.  I've modeled eyeballs that produce red-eye when light is shown into them using Carrara.  So anything is possible.

same basic idea applies to glass windows, 2 planes representing the 2 surfaces, which today i just found is causing reflections to once again not work out right, since both planes on the glass have "glass" type shader, including reflections. 
con - reflections on both surfaces causes reflection wars, causing them to show reflections of eachother, along with screwing up lighting on them
pro - nice place to use SSS when double planes, and if refraction is set right, makes it look a lot more like windows :)

still need to fix reflections though -_-

The way I've always pulled off this trick is to create a cube in the Vertex Modeler and then assign one of the faces as the "mirror" in the shading domains and the inverse of that as the glass. I'll usually dial back the glass reflection value to 1 or 2 percent simply because there actually is a slight double reflection. Doing it this way creates realistic edge details too, which is always nice. Mark

hmm i dont see the same flaw in the reflections, and only real difference is the normals would be pointing opposite directions, while in mine, they both face 'forward" towards the ball, odd how things work now

and yes i know both have reflections in the real world, but was no point to use the front one when other things didnt work right :) as for the edges, the frame of the mirror covers them in my model, so was no point to having them either

thanks for the solution though :) reversing the back normal works :D