I have tried every single tutorial, read me - walkthough I have come across - 
and I simply can not get water - or a reflective watery surface in poser.  
I imagine you should be able to see the lights reflected in a clearish 
type material right?  

Here are my settings:
(will put them in a follow up post they messed up the formatting)

Any help much appreciated.

Gosh, you need bagginsbill for this!  :)

I do remember him telling me in a recent thread at RDNA that the Fresnel node should not be used because it causes double reflections. And that the fresnel effect should be accomplished with a combination of other nodes.

There was a thread here about diamonds which turned into a general thread about reflection including water reflection.  The water effect in there was achieved with the fresnel node, but apparently in that case, the double reflection (which wasn't known at that time), didn't matter because the inside of the tub was white and  double refletctions weren't really noticed.  Anyway, all I know is that he said after that, to not use the fresnel node at all for anything :) So I don't worry about that node anymore.

I also know that the Diffuse_Value + Reflect_Value = 1  Your example has them equalling 2.

I'm still working on learning all of this stuff too.  I dabbled with it before, but nothing serious because my computer couldn't do raytracing. Now that I have a new computer that can, I'm somewhat behind in learning all these great things :)

Oh, and you need something in the scene to reflect off of.   Primatives around the figure out of view, a sky dome.... something to allow reflection to happen.

You also absolutely must render with Ray Tracing enabled - not ray traced shadows for a given light, but in the Render Options panel.  I believe 1 raytrace bounce is enough, I know for certain 2 is enough.

There is not that much to it, but I've explaied it a few times recently.  Search this forum, for Sky Dome, and me, then sort by date.

This is a good example of when you would want to use a Sky Dome and the Raytracing , VS. a Reflection Map, becasue you want  a Figure to Reflect, not just a background image.

Acadia...That was your thread on Diamonds...I'm the one you asked for my Tiara scene file...you still hav'nt shown us what you've done with it...and I've asked you about this before...

pjx99 - No, you do'nt need Raytracing if you use a Reflection Map(AN Image_Map node plugged into the PoserSurface Reflection node.) 

In this case Acadia had an idea of what she was talking about, the Diffuse Value would need to be zero, for the Reflection Value to be 1, to get the Reflection Map to reflect in/from the object %100.  Adding a Diffuse value, means taking away from the Reflection Value, with obvious consequences.

"You also absolutely must render with Ray Tracing enabled"

I have it enabled and have it set to like 5 bounces.

[qute]pjx99 - No, you do'nt need Raytracing if you use a Reflection Map(AN Image_Map node plugged into the PoserSurface Reflection node.) 

I didn't know that, thanks for the info - I don't use reflection maps but good to know (maybe I should learn).

Note that the high-rez square primitive prop tends to make slightly distorted reflections; a large number of polygons on the reflector does not improve the reflection, so there is no reason not to use a single sided square prop, and it will render faster as a bonus.  Hope this helps.

ps: that is with 1 raytrace bounce, 1 light.  more bounces and lights can improve quality, this was just a minimal test.

jjroland - Notice the Red and Green walls in pjz's image? That is what acadia and I are getting at with a Sky Dome. Without objects, the Poser scene space is void, so there is nothing for a reflective material to react with/show(The Background Color or Image do'nt count.)

A Sky Dome is the easiest, and ideal way to circumvent not having anytng to reflect, at any angle. Sky Domes are what make skies, and reflections so easy in Vue, and Bryce, because these programs have Sky Domes built in as critical parts of the scene structure. This is possible in Poser, but you need to add this yourself.

Ajax's is the best I know, Just load this Figure into a scene, it's huge, but it's Ground Plane will position itself perfect. By default it's Water plane renders a little slow though, so just unckeck Dissplacement, from your renders settings, and/or e-mail me for my Double Sky material/texture. Then apply Reflective material to the ground. If you look around the web for 360 degree panormaic Photographs, you'll find images to texture the Sky Material Zone with; or if you have Vue or Bryce, they can export a Sky or 360 Panoramic texture. Then set the Preview to the Sky material, and make each other Material Zone Transparent.

I, personally, do'nt ever see myself using a Reflection Map. When I have a reflective material in my scene I want evertything in my scene reflecting off of that. If I were to use a Reflection Map, that Map would need to be updated, each time something in the scene was moved, or added!

FYI - THe Poser Manual recommends using 3 bounces, for Raytracing.

Quote - Then apply Reflective material to the ground. If you look around the web for 360 degree panormaic Photographs, you'll find images to texture the Sky Material Zone with

I, personally, do'nt ever see myself using a Reflection Map. When I have a reflective material in my scene I want evertything in my scene reflecting off of that. If I were to use a Reflection Map, that Map would need to be updated, each time something in the scene was moved, or added!

FYI - THe Poser Manual recommends using 3 bounces, for Raytracing.

I was doing fine with your post until that part and then i was lost.

Where do you find "reflective" materials? I've never heard of that before.  The only way I know how to achieve reflection is with the reflection node or fresnel effect that Bagginsbill posted.  And that is applied to any material you want to apply it to, such as a floor or a wall if you want a reflection to appear there.

Quote - Where do you find "reflective" materials? I've never heard of that before.  The only way I know how to achieve reflection is with the reflection node or fresnel effect that Bagginsbill posted.  And that is applied to any material you want to apply it to, such as a floor or a wall if you want a reflection to appear there.

You're talking about the same thing :)  The Reflection node is what Angeloucircuitry posted about above.

Attached Link: The Fresnel Effect - Glass, Paint, Plastic, and Metal

There are 5 typical interactions that light makes with most materials. All of these can be mixed together in various combinations to simulate different types of materials. Each photon that strikes a surface actually only does one of these 5 hings. But millions of photons can hit the same spot and each will choose what to do independently, but overall, as a group, they follow well known statistical patterns. Poser nodes can implement these interactions following various rules. Putting them together in the right amounts creates believable materials.

The five interactions are:

1. absorption (the photon's energy becomes heat)
2. reflection (the photon bounces off the surface, no color change, just a direction change - the departing direction is unique for each arriving direction, aka mirroring)
3. diffuse (the photon bounces off the surface, usually with a color change, in a random direction)
4. refraction (the photon enters the surface, and may leave the other side, changing direction and possibly color on the way)
5. transparency (the photon ignores the surface and just keeps on going)

Unless you're using a very expensive program like Maxwell, you're not actually simulating photons. In Poser, we have a number of different nodes that each offer a subset of the simulation of these phenomena, simplified to a statistical model based on the overall probability of these events ocurring. By manipulating the colors and numerical values on these nodes, you're describing a broad range of behaviors.

Software simulations of direct light and indirect light are very different computationally. In the interest of speed, many of these interactions are ignored unless you use additional nodes. Further, some interactions cannot be simulated in Poser at all, because there are no nodes to do them. Some of these interactions require ray-tracing - a potentially expensive operation. Still others require something called "photon mapping" - Poser doesn't do this at all except for the Gather node, which totally crap. But I digress. So we have to think about the key issue of direct illumination (photon left a light and has struck the first surface in the scene) versus indirect illumination (the photon has interacted with some other surface before arriving on this surface).

For example, since lights are not real objects in your scene (not usually anyway) you can't see them in reflections from the Reflect node. The Reflect node (which requires raytracing) only simulates reflection of indirect light, i.e. a photon that left a light source and has struck some other surface first. Thus, the Reflect node alone will not show any indication of light sources. The particular case of direct light source reflection is handled (much more cheaply, without raytracing) by the specular nodes. This is what specular reflection is in a 3d renderer - the direct reflection of a light source.

A word of warning about Diffuse in Poser - it is NEVER accurate, because it only calculates for photons coming from light sources, direct illumination. It does not include light bouncing or originating from other objects. Better renders do take this into account for diffuse calculations - this is generally called "global illumination" or GI for short. It is the absence of GI that mostly makes Poser renders fail to look completely real. We work around the issue with Image Base Lights, but that's a cheat and only gets you about half way there. But I digress ... again.

The PoserSurface (or root node) has built into it a number of simulators as well as channels to plug in additional ones (nodes).

The Diffuse_Color and Diffuse_Value implement interaction #3. (This is the same as placing a Diffuse node into your shader). For a mirror or water that isn't dirty, #3 never happens, so the Diffuse_Value should be 0.

The Specular_Color, Specular_Value, and Highlight_Size implement specular reflection (#2 from a light). You probably aren't seeing lights reflected in your cloth plane because your light isn't coming in the right direction for it to bounce into the camera. Based on the preview, it looks like the light is coming forward from behind the camera and a little to the left. When that hits the surface, it will not come back to the camera but continue going away. If you want to see specular reflection on the surface, point your light down and backward, so the light bounces up into your camera.

The Ambient_Color and Ambient_Value simulate light being emitted from your surface, instead of arriving from somewhere else. We don't need those for water or a mirror.

The Transparency parameters simulate #5 - the photon just passes straight on through. When set to 1, 100% of the photons go through. When set to .5, 50% of the photons go through. However, you'll never "see" a light through transparency - you'll only see other objects in the scene. How to simulate seeing a light, like the sun, through an object is beyond the scope of this thread. You could use this for water, but it won't look right, because water bends the light. I see a lot of renders in the gallery using Transparency for water and it sux. Also, people are often confused by the meaning of transparency - it should mostly be used to mean "no surface here". The Transparency input modified almost all the other settings, and does so in non-intuitive ways, particularly when values between 0 and 1 are used. Be careful with this one. For water, glass, etc. don't use it unless you're saying "no surface here".

The Translucence_Color and Translucence_Value are for simulating Diffuse refraction - where light goes into a material and gets partially absorbed, and partially scattered, and comes out the other side. It is very limited and only works for very thin objects. Also, it only handles direct illumination.

The Reflection_Color and Reflection_Value are just channel inputs and don't do anything on their own. You must plug one or more nodes in to make them work. Nodes you should use here are Reflect, Sphere_Map, etc. A word of warning: these inputs are modified by the checkboxes Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult. I won't even bother to explain those. Just remember this: ALWAYS TURN THOSE OFF - ALWAYS. They will never help you get what you want, which is realism. With those items turned off, the Reflection input just gets added to the rendered color, unless you have Transparency on as well. Don't use transparency with reflection unless it is 100%, meaning "no surface here".

I noticed that you have BOTH of those nasty checkboxes turned on. TURN THEM OFF. Because you said you do have raytracing on, I believe you're getting blackness because of Reflection_Kd_Mult. It is multiplying the reflections with the result of the internal Diffuse calculation (a pointless operation). Because you have the internal Diffuse_Color set to BLACK, you're Diffuse calculation is always BLACK and you're getting BLACK on all reflections.

The Refraction_Color and Refraction_Value inputs also do nothing on their own. You must plug one or more nodes in to make them work. Nodes you should use here include Refract, Fresnel, etc.

Bump and Displacement are used to simulate non-smooth-and-flat surfaces. Beyond the scope of this thread.

The Alternate_Diffuse and Alternate_Specular inputs are for plugging in nodes. Use them when you want a different version of diffuse or specular reflection, such as Glossy or Clay. When using those, you should turn off (set to 0) the built-in Diffuse_Value or Specular_Value.

Now certain nodes only operate if you are using Firefly renderer and have raytracing enabled. Nodes that require raytracing include AO, Reflect, Refract, and Fresnel. (Fresnel is a combination of Reflect, Refract, and EdgeBlend)

Acadia is right that I recently said to stop using Fresnel. I did a render with some eye glasses on a figure, and it showed the iris in two places - double refraction (not reflection as Acadia said). But I will say that until now I never saw this problem and for clear water the Fresnel node has always been fine. But I suggest you get used to using Reflect and Refract with EdgeBlend - you'll have more control and always get the right result.

Acadia and Angelouscuitry also rightly pointed out that you must have something to reflect. A sky dome, or a room type environment complete with walls and ceilings all around are important.

When the Reflect node calculates that there's nothing to reflect, it then uses whatever is plugged into the "Background" parameter. In your case, you plugged in a simple gray color. This is pointless - you could just as well have put in gray directly in the Reflect.Background parameter. But the real purpose of the parameter is to plug in a Sphere_Map node and then plug an ImageMap into the Sphere_Map, and make sure you have a panoramic image in the ImageMap. What that does is say "look, if you can't find anything to reflect, use this image, but pretend its a sphere surrounding the whole scene". The shader posted by pjz99 has the Sphere_Map plugged into the gray color, which again is pointless. That's a lot of extra calculations just to come up with GRAY. My habit is to put hot pink into the Reflect.Background parameter. Then if I forget to completely enclose my scene, or there's a hole in it somewhere, the surface will show a hot pink reflection in the render, and that's my cue that I forgot to do something important.

Same thing with the Refract.Background - put a Sphere_Map and a panoramic image, or put hot green to tell you when you're hitting nothing.

Finally, the only type of material that does near perfect reflections at all angles is a mirror or a very shiny metal like chrome. All other reflective materials do not reflect the same amount in all directions. This is called the Fresnel effect and is absolutely necessary for realism. The Reflect node does not implement the effet. The Fresnel node does. But you should learn how to do it properly yourself, for a number of reasons. Please follow the link to my tutorial.

I suggest next time you post an image, don't put it at full size like that. Let Rendo shrink it, and users can click it to see the full size. It makes the text wraparound really wide, making it hard to read.

I'm going to say some key things again - everybody remember them next time somebody has trouble with reflection/refraction.

1) It is better to have a completely enclosed environment to reflect and refract. Failing that use a Sphere_Map plugged into a panoramic image. Do not plug gray into the background - it will look stupid. Better is black if you can't do anything else.

1. You must turn on raytracing, with at least  1 bounce for reflection, at least 2 for refraction, and at least 4, better 6 if you're trying to see glass in/through glass (reflections of reflections of refractions, etc.)

3) ALWAYS DISABLE Reflection_Lite_Mult - NEVER NEVER USE IT.

1. ALWAYS DISABLE Reflection_Kd_Mult - NEVER NEVER USE IT.

2. The Fresnel node sometimes does double refractions when simulating a lens. (Thin curved object). If your'e getting this, stop using it and do Reflect+Refract+EdgeBlend.

3. Things don't look real unles you do the Fresnel effect. Read my tut.

4. Metal colors its reflections - nothing else does.

5. And the golden rule - conservation of energy: Reflection_Value + Refraction_Value + Diffuse_Value must be <= 1. If you're using nodes to vary one of them, make sure you use subtraction nodes to offset the others.

Hrm I am trying still.  Not exactly getting the results that have been shown here.  Thanks for all the help.  Going to go through the tuturial and try to take it step by step without destroying my scene : /.  Will post my results and any more questions in a followup thread to leave this hideously formatted one in the past = )

J you ought to save a copy of what you have "just in case" :)  A good idea is to just make a sandbox scene with simple stuff, until you get a grip on what works how (which I will be doing with BagginsBill's info e.g.)

I positioned the light low and opposite to the camera. It is an infinite light. I also have an IBL for general illumination. Because the light is behind the props, most of the diffuse light you see, for example on the stairs, is from the IBL.

Wow!  That look is exactly what I am hoping to get.  I will try those settings, thank you!

Specifically which square from the primitives is being used here?  I was previously trying with the HiRes square - is that correct?

I love tutorials like this - I just need to find the time to practice it now

I have water!!!! whooo hooo

I don't see anyway for me to allow renderosity to resize my picture.. but this one is small enough anyway I think = )

Thank you so much for all your help Bagginsbill, Angelousity, Pjz and Acadia!

I still need to work on the lighting, I am totally baffled by IBL and how they work and how to use them - hopefully I get there eventually - for now:

I HAVE WATER!!!!! 

Attached Link: IBL Ins and outs by Olivier

Regarding the image - instead of using the Insert Image button in this little editor thingy, just look below where it says Attach a File: - just click the Browse button and select your image. It will be included above your text, which is sometimes not as good, but it will automatically be shown to us in a nice size for the forum, and support a click to show it in a new window at full size. This how I always post images in this forum.

IBL is not that hard. There are plenty of threads around here, and also at RuntimeDNA. Also, you should know that using an image for IBL is not strictly necessary. You can design your lighting scheme by just hand-painting the lighting or even by using nodes and nothing more.

You should check out the linked thread by Olivier on how to use various image maps to design your own IBL.

Oh I forgot to say I did use the Square-Hi Res in that render because it does render fuzzy reflections, which I liked in this case. For clean reflections, try the One-Sided square.

I just wanted to say well done jjroland!

My first attempts at re-creating water in Poser were horribly unsuccessful. It feels so good when you finally get it.

It's not just getting it to work either. It's understanding WHY it works. Bagginsbill is the man when it comes to education us poor schlubs on the in's and out's of Nodes.

Well put Clawshrimp!

I have been using reflections for so long and yet I can't believe how little I understood.  Furthermore, despite the fact that I often get many compliments for my pretty reflections, I have never been able to render half decent water!

Thank you bagginsbill your mini-tut was easy to follow and answered many questions.  Heck, it answered questions I didn't even know I had!

Good work jjroland!  Isn't it nice when something finally comes together and makes a bit more sense?

Man, I'm inspired.  Maybe I've had too much coffee...

Yeah as usual Bagginsbill has provided some really useful and interesting info.  Great examples, thanks very much.

Thought I'd share the result here - Thank you all for all the help - and the compliments ; )

Now that I am done with the project in question - I am tutorial bound !!!!!

VERY NICE! That's an excellent image.

That does look really cool J, great job.  Nice little blend where the plant comes out of the water.
and of course I love the hair :)

Quote - jjroland:

There are 5 typical interactions that light makes with most materials. All of these can be mixed together in various combinations to simulate different types of materials. Each photon that strikes a surface actually only does one of these 5 hings. But millions of photons can hit the same spot and each will choose what to do independently, but overall, as a group, they follow well known statistical patterns. Poser nodes can implement these interactions following various rules. Putting them together in the right amounts creates believable materials.

The five interactions are:

1. absorption (the photon's energy becomes heat)
2. reflection (the photon bounces off the surface, no color change, just a direction change - the departing direction is unique for each arriving direction, aka mirroring)
3. diffuse (the photon bounces off the surface, usually with a color change, in a random direction)
4. refraction (the photon enters the surface, and may leave the other side, changing direction and possibly color on the way)
5. transparency (the photon ignores the surface and just keeps on going)

Unless you're using a very expensive program like Maxwell, you're not actually simulating photons. In Poser, we have a number of different nodes that each offer a subset of the simulation of these phenomena, simplified to a statistical model based on the overall probability of these events ocurring. By manipulating the colors and numerical values on these nodes, you're describing a broad range of behaviors.

Software simulations of direct light and indirect light are very different computationally. In the interest of speed, many of these interactions are ignored unless you use additional nodes. Further, some interactions cannot be simulated in Poser at all, because there are no nodes to do them. Some of these interactions require ray-tracing - a potentially expensive operation. Still others require something called "photon mapping" - Poser doesn't do this at all except for the Gather node, which totally crap. But I digress. So we have to think about the key issue of direct illumination (photon left a light and has struck the first surface in the scene) versus indirect illumination (the photon has interacted with some other surface before arriving on this surface).

For example, since lights are not real objects in your scene (not usually anyway) you can't see them in reflections from the Reflect node. The Reflect node (which requires raytracing) only simulates reflection of indirect light, i.e. a photon that left a light source and has struck some other surface first. Thus, the Reflect node alone will not show any indication of light sources. The particular case of direct light source reflection is handled (much more cheaply, without raytracing) by the specular nodes. This is what specular reflection is in a 3d renderer - the direct reflection of a light source.

A word of warning about Diffuse in Poser - it is NEVER accurate, because it only calculates for photons coming from light sources, direct illumination. It does not include light bouncing or originating from other objects. Better renders do take this into account for diffuse calculations - this is generally called "global illumination" or GI for short. It is the absence of GI that mostly makes Poser renders fail to look completely real. We work around the issue with Image Base Lights, but that's a cheat and only gets you about half way there. But I digress ... again.

The PoserSurface (or root node) has built into it a number of simulators as well as channels to plug in additional ones (nodes).

The Diffuse_Color and Diffuse_Value implement interaction #3. (This is the same as placing a Diffuse node into your shader). For a mirror or water that isn't dirty, #3 never happens, so the Diffuse_Value should be 0.

The Specular_Color, Specular_Value, and Highlight_Size implement specular reflection (#2 from a light). You probably aren't seeing lights reflected in your cloth plane because your light isn't coming in the right direction for it to bounce into the camera. Based on the preview, it looks like the light is coming forward from behind the camera and a little to the left. When that hits the surface, it will not come back to the camera but continue going away. If you want to see specular reflection on the surface, point your light down and backward, so the light bounces up into your camera.

The Ambient_Color and Ambient_Value simulate light being emitted from your surface, instead of arriving from somewhere else. We don't need those for water or a mirror.

The Transparency parameters simulate #5 - the photon just passes straight on through. When set to 1, 100% of the photons go through. When set to .5, 50% of the photons go through. However, you'll never "see" a light through transparency - you'll only see other objects in the scene. How to simulate seeing a light, like the sun, through an object is beyond the scope of this thread. You could use this for water, but it won't look right, because water bends the light. I see a lot of renders in the gallery using Transparency for water and it sux. Also, people are often confused by the meaning of transparency - it should mostly be used to mean "no surface here". The Transparency input modified almost all the other settings, and does so in non-intuitive ways, particularly when values between 0 and 1 are used. Be careful with this one. For water, glass, etc. don't use it unless you're saying "no surface here".

The Translucence_Color and Translucence_Value are for simulating Diffuse refraction - where light goes into a material and gets partially absorbed, and partially scattered, and comes out the other side. It is very limited and only works for very thin objects. Also, it only handles direct illumination.

The Reflection_Color and Reflection_Value are just channel inputs and don't do anything on their own. You must plug one or more nodes in to make them work. Nodes you should use here are Reflect, Sphere_Map, etc. A word of warning: these inputs are modified by the checkboxes Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult. I won't even bother to explain those. Just remember this: ALWAYS TURN THOSE OFF - ALWAYS. They will never help you get what you want, which is realism. With those items turned off, the Reflection input just gets added to the rendered color, unless you have Transparency on as well. Don't use transparency with reflection unless it is 100%, meaning "no surface here".

I noticed that you have BOTH of those nasty checkboxes turned on. TURN THEM OFF. Because you said you do have raytracing on, I believe you're getting blackness because of Reflection_Kd_Mult. It is multiplying the reflections with the result of the internal Diffuse calculation (a pointless operation). Because you have the internal Diffuse_Color set to BLACK, you're Diffuse calculation is always BLACK and you're getting BLACK on all reflections.

The Refraction_Color and Refraction_Value inputs also do nothing on their own. You must plug one or more nodes in to make them work. Nodes you should use here include Refract, Fresnel, etc.

Bump and Displacement are used to simulate non-smooth-and-flat surfaces. Beyond the scope of this thread.

The Alternate_Diffuse and Alternate_Specular inputs are for plugging in nodes. Use them when you want a different version of diffuse or specular reflection, such as Glossy or Clay. When using those, you should turn off (set to 0) the built-in Diffuse_Value or Specular_Value.

Now certain nodes only operate if you are using Firefly renderer and have raytracing enabled. Nodes that require raytracing include AO, Reflect, Refract, and Fresnel. (Fresnel is a combination of Reflect, Refract, and EdgeBlend)

Acadia is right that I recently said to stop using Fresnel. I did a render with some eye glasses on a figure, and it showed the iris in two places - double refraction (not reflection as Acadia said). But I will say that until now I never saw this problem and for clear water the Fresnel node has always been fine. But I suggest you get used to using Reflect and Refract with EdgeBlend - you'll have more control and always get the right result.

Acadia and Angelouscuitry also rightly pointed out that you must have something to reflect. A sky dome, or a room type environment complete with walls and ceilings all around are important.

When the Reflect node calculates that there's nothing to reflect, it then uses whatever is plugged into the "Background" parameter. In your case, you plugged in a simple gray color. This is pointless - you could just as well have put in gray directly in the Reflect.Background parameter. But the real purpose of the parameter is to plug in a Sphere_Map node and then plug an ImageMap into the Sphere_Map, and make sure you have a panoramic image in the ImageMap. What that does is say "look, if you can't find anything to reflect, use this image, but pretend its a sphere surrounding the whole scene". The shader posted by pjz99 has the Sphere_Map plugged into the gray color, which again is pointless. That's a lot of extra calculations just to come up with GRAY. My habit is to put hot pink into the Reflect.Background parameter. Then if I forget to completely enclose my scene, or there's a hole in it somewhere, the surface will show a hot pink reflection in the render, and that's my cue that I forgot to do something important.

Same thing with the Refract.Background - put a Sphere_Map and a panoramic image, or put hot green to tell you when you're hitting nothing.

Finally, the only type of material that does near perfect reflections at all angles is a mirror or a very shiny metal like chrome. All other reflective materials do not reflect the same amount in all directions. This is called the Fresnel effect and is absolutely necessary for realism. The Reflect node does not implement the effet. The Fresnel node does. But you should learn how to do it properly yourself, for a number of reasons. Please follow the link to my tutorial.

hello. i see that you are an expert for reflection. i asked this question already but i will again.
how can i make a silver surfer? he is like silver. but does silver reflect everything? it doesnt work like a mirror IMO.
the reflection looks blurry. plus it looks like there is always some grey in the reflection. . does silver desaturate the reflection that is in the background?

here are some pics from the SS:

ok here is my render. i used settings fro myour tutorial .
this is with a blurry pic.

this is with a normal pic of a city.

 The hard part about rendering a SIlver Surfer Character is deciding what's getting reflected. 

The SIlver Surfer will look different every where he is huh?  The answer is yes, because he'd be reflecting his surrounds where ever he went.  If her were in a blue room with blue walls and a blue floor then he'd be pretty blue, if he were on a ski slope on a cloady day then he'd be very white, or if her were really out in space he'd be mostly black with white spots(star reflections.)  This, in Poser would be represented by your Sky Dome, Atmosphere, Objects, or Reflection Map. 

BTW - If you want to cheat a little and do actually want to make him appear the same, no matter where he is, then your looking at adding a Reflection Map.  This is done by plugging an Image_Map node into the the PoserSUrface Reflection node, and then setting the Diffuse Value(and I think Refraction Value) to zero.

whats hte best way to blurry the light?

p.s. here is a clip from the silver surfer. its the same in the movie. the reflection is blurry. but when i dont know how to make it blurry in poser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4_2jw4v704

You would blur the Texture Map for your Sky Dome, or Reflection Map.

I'll lok at the YouTUbe page after I've setup some other things, on this fresh install of Windows.  I'm not sure why you'd try for a blur though, that would mean his skin is'nt smooooth?

Quote - You would blur the Texture Map for your Sky Dome, or Reflection Map.

I'll lok at the YouTUbe page after I've setup some other things, on this fresh install of Windows.  I'm not sure why you'd try for a blur though, that would mean his skin is'nt smooooth?

thanks but i know that if i blurry the reflection map that it will be blurry. 
but what about teh objects?

um, pardon, but isn't that a factor of the reflection node? that is, isn't that one of the settings?  i remember my first experiments with reflection (just a plain floor- just wanted the figure, not an environment) had a blurred reflection.  not very fine, but the samples were low.  i suspect that reflections will have the same sampling issues that ambient occlusion and raytraced shadows have, but you could give it a try.

I'm doing a render now to demo this for you. The Reflect node has a Softness parameter - what this does is randomize the surface normal, so the reflections jiggle around pointing in the "wrong" location. The Quality parameter increases the number of extra rays used to calculate the soft reflection. It's not very good, and it's very slow, but it works.

One approach would be to use a high-res in-focus image for your environment sphere so it shows up nicely in the background, but make the environment sphere invisible to raytracing. Then put a reflect node on the figure as usual, but connect the Reflect.Background to a Sphere_Map node and set it to white. Then connect the Sphere_Map node to an Image_Map node, but choose a blurred version of your scene photo. This way, any nearby objects will be reflected by the figure, and when not, it will use the blurred image.

But meanwhile, I'm rendering with Quality = 1 and Softness = 1 - excruciatingly slow compared to my usual renders, but the results may be worth it to you.

Chrome or mercury, as in the chrome wheel, actually does reflect almost perfectly like a mirror. The distortions of the scene appear because of the curves.

Real silver often does not, unless the surface has been highly polished. In any case, not only does it blur a bit, but it also does not reflect 100%. Instead some Diffuse is present. To get this, just change the colors in your EdgeBlend - put a medium-high gray in the Value_1, and almost white in the Value_2. Don't go too far though, or it will start to look like white paint with a clear-coat gloss finish.