The Reflection Channel allows us to simulate the appearance of shiny or
reflective objects. In this video, we're going to use the
Reflection Channel to create a mirror ball, or I guess you might know it as a
disco ball. It looks something like this.
Now, this is a photograph, so, our results will probably look a little bit different.
But this will give you a sense of what we're shooting for.
The first step is to create a new material.
And I'm going to go to my Material Manager, and go to Create > New Material,
and I'm going to name this, mirror ball. Next, I'm going to open up this material
and activate Reflection, and just apply it to my disco ball object and press Render.
Now, it's starting to look a little bit like a disco ball.
It's certainly reflecting some part of the world, we can see a reflection of our floor.
And it's looking alright in that, that sort of the plating that its got on it is
doing a lot of the work for us. But I don't know, it still looks a little,
how do you say, ugly. How do we go about making it look better?
Well, the key to creating an interesting looking reflective object, is to take your
object and put it inside of an interesting environment.
Now, I've already done some work for you in that I've created a sky object in the scene.
And if you go into your four way view, you can't really see it because it's
infinitely large, but just trust there's a big sky encompassing all of this.
And in your Material Manager, there's a material called hdri001, which I've pulled
from the content browser. Now, drag hdri001 onto your sky ball, and
give this material another Render. What you'll see is that we're now
reflecting a more interesting environment, at least in the top half of our object.
Now, if I took my mirror ball out of this studio environment, it might look even better.
Now, another thing that I might want to do is make this mirror ball look a little bit cheaper.
At the moment, it looks like we've hired NASA to create a perfect mirror for our
mirror ball. Let's go into our mirror ball texture again.
So, I'm just going to single click on that texture there.
Go to the Reflection Channel and adjust its brightness.
I'm going to set the brightness of my reflection to about 90%.
So, the reflection isn't quite as strong, and render again.
It's a little bit more dim. And if I want, I can further degrade the
quality by going into that Reflection Channel and adding what's called blurriness.
And it does exactly what you'd think. It takes your reflection and it makes it a
little bit blurrier. Now, the problem with this is that it can
be incredibly slow. Now, the machine I'm working on is
actually pretty zippy, so, you won't experience that.
But avoid cranking up the blurriness setting too high as that will definitely
slow down your renders. But looking at this material, I see that
we've done a pretty good job of simulating a mirror ball.
So, in short, the Reflection Channel can help you create realistic metals,
plastics, and other shiny objects. But bear in mind that reflections can
easily double render times, and blurry reflections can be even slower than that.