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Reflecting a black object
Hi…
I’m having a problem reflecting anything black in c4d. I thought it might be my file so I just created a plane and a cube with one overhead light. The plane gets a generic surface with the reflection channel turned up to 100%. The cube gets a generic material colored black. When I render this out, the cube doesn’t reflect on the plane. I’ve tried both coloring the material black and leaving the material white and turning the brightness down to 0. When I use any other color, the cube reflects fine. Anyone ever experience this?
On a similar note, I have the same problem when I try to color the plane with a material that has a very high luminosity to try and simulate a white surface (like white plexiglass)….I don’t get any reflections from any objects…they are just blown out.
Thanks in advance!
Ken -
3 Replies
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You should balance your surface settings. What you are trying to do goes against the mathematics of raytracing. Your surfaces blow out because you are wanting them to reflect and not reflect at the same time (from the point of the rendering engine) and the overall amount of light/ energy exceeds the computed limits. Similarly your completely black cube will “eat up” all energy – it behaves like a black hole because you are basically telling the renderer to not go looking for reflections if a ray is completely empty (after all, black equates to zero) and does not carry any color information. Instead of working with absolutes you should always try to find the closest values that allow you to work within the laws imposed by the renderer – if your looks black, it does not need to be completely black. Also make sure your always adjust your surface’s diffuse values. They are most critical in solving your problems.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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the default world in C4D (and most(?) other 3D programs) is black. So when you have a plane reflecting a black cube and the world behind that is black you see nothing because the cube is identical to the background (except for specular highlights which could be reflected) which is why any other color does show, it’s different from the background. If you want a black cube to show up in a reflection the ‘sky’ can’t be black too. There has to be a room or a sky object or an environment or something to reflect that will be different than the black cube.
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Thanks to both of you. I’ll experiment a bit, but the answers are there.
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