I am sorry about my English… Well, I guess that some of you have already “assembled” a Christmas tree, and then you just put those balls (is this the way you call in English?) to adorn it, ok? Well, there are those which are mirrored and colored. Ok, how can I texture a simple colored christmas ball in Blender? Ok, I know I could alter the colors in the materials buttons, and push “add” button instead of mix. I did it, but the ball became, let’s say, red, but it was… “milky”. Have you ever looked to a red mirrored Christmas ball carefully? The light (from a lightbulb at home) will reflect as red. Well, I guess that I can adjust the spec color to red, to simulate this, but what about the rest of the ball? I didn’t get to do this correctly in Blender. Anyone? 
You are looking for reflections (this is the correct English word, I can tell you this because I’m not native english either 
)
You need to seek a tutorial for reflections. Search the list on the topmost pos in this forum. They are usually for planar reflections, but for spherical works the same.
You are also very lucky because old blender.nl site is back, with ALL its tuts, so you can go to
http://oldsite.blender3d.org/showitem.php?id=100
ANd learn directly spherical reflection
Welcome to Blender,
Stefano
If you plan on having a lot of reflections, however, your best bet would be to use an export script and an external renderer, like Lightflow, PovRay, a Renderman-compliant, YafRay, …
Martin
Thank you for your answers, but that is not exactly what I want… I know how to make reflections in Blender, but the point is to make a simple red one!! If I select the “add” button and alter the color to red, the reflection will be a little wierd, will be milky… I will be happy with just one reflection that Blender can do. Still din’t get to make Python work… I have adjusted paths, but the codes have changed (IPO, i guess)…
Have you tried messing with the colorband settings in the texture window? Try setting this color to red (my values are about R=1.2, G=0.2 B=0). You might also want to mess with the specular color (in the material buttons) to make it slightly red as well. Here’s a picture:
My material settings for the red sphere are as follows:
Base color (R,G,B) == 0,0,0 (black)
Specular color (R,G,B) == 1.0, 0.2, 0.1 (reddish)
Specular value == 1.33
Hard == 203
Envmap is mapped with “Refl” and “Sphere” on and “Col” and “Add.”
Hope that helps!
Wooowww!! You really did it!! Thank you very much!! Hey, I will save this settings, but you did something very interesting. It is that each ball reflects the other. Although I have a tutorial that shows how to make this, could you please send this blend file or post it here for download? So that I can examine it more accurately and learn? (specially those reflections) Thank you very much!! I tried to adjust those settings, but I dind’t get to do what you did!! Thank you very much for your help!!
Here’s the file (~1.5MB, compressed):
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rayae1/envmaps.zip
All I did was render the scene once, with all the envmaps, then free data and render each envmap at a time. I stopped once I was pleased with the interreflection. Then I saved the envmaps and loaded them so I wouldn’t need to go through the whole process every time I opened the file. :-?
Glad to see I could help. :Z
/me finally finds opportunity to use Zorro smiley - he he!
Thanks, Ray-theway! I tried to do as you mentioned but the sphere didn’t reflect. I found it odd, but now I will check the blend file and see what was my mistake. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t work because I put the envmap to Sphere (added and tried with “Empty”), adjusted the “Refl” and put “col”, “add”. So, I have missed something. I can do it with normal reflections, but when I tried to make it colored, it didn’t work. Now I will learn what I did wrong! Thank you very much for your help!! :D!
Ray_theway… I am sorry to bother you again, but after I downloaded your zip file I could not open it. I tried with 7-Zip, Ultimate Zip, then rebooted, got in Linux, tried with the Ark (I think), but didn’t get it. UltimateZip says file is corrupt and Akr says it is empty… Wouldn’t you mind re-zipping it again and posting it? Sorry to bother you again… just wanting to learn… and couldn’t…
Sure thing. Since you have Linux, I compressed it as a tar.gz instead of a zip. You can find it here:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rayae1/envmaps.tar.gz
Sorry about that!
OH, boy… It took me some time to get to extract the tar.gz (not a Linux expert) file but when I tried to open the file, Blender crashed… First, I tried (in Windows) with Blender Publisher 2.25. Second, with Blender Creator 2.23 and finally, I returned to Linux and tried with Blender Publisher 2.25 (the Linux version, not emulating Windows there with wine or something). Blender simply closed… sigh… . Well, which Blender version are you using? Did you made it with Blender in Windows or Linux? Well, I can make reflections normally, but I don’t know very much how to deal with the texture colored values, only in the materials windows. I tried to add and adjust the new color (texture windows - don’t know very much how to deal with it), pushed the “Refl”, “Col”, “Add” buttons, but when I rendered it, the reflecions didn’t appear. Lights were ok. Did you use an empty? Did you put “Empty” on textures windows or did you put “Shpere”? (considering the name of it, of course). Oh, boy… thanks for helping me, but it seems today is not my lucky day… And sorry to bother you again…
I made mine under Windows. Sorry my file didn’t extract right. (Just wondering, did you do “tar -xzf envmaps.tar.gz” ? It worked for me with Cygwin)
About the scene itself, I did use empties to map the reflection map. If you can read my scene, I have called them E1 and E2. In the texture window, I put “E1” and “E2” in the Ob: field. Each empty was placed at the exact center of each sphere.
Some tips in the texture window: The colors are on a scale of 0.0-2.0, instead of 0.0-1.0 in the material window. To make things a little easier, here are some screenshots of my workspace:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rayae1/envshot1.jpg
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rayae1/envshot2.jpg
Also, one sphere is in layer 2 and another in layer 3 so that when I choose “Don’t render this layer”, the envmap will render everything else in the scene. Hope that helps as well. And don’t worry, you’re not a bother. Just keep asking questions and, hopefully, you’ll keep getting answers. 
Thanks for helping!! I think I understood your explanation! Thanks. So you dind’t use the color band, just those color sliders in the texture button… That makes it different… I will try to do this, and then I will post so that you can see it. There is one more doubt about reflections that I will post later (this night yet). I will explain later, since I will soon celebrate Christmas!
Oh! And if you celebrate Christmas, I wish Merry Christmas for you!! I know it is tomorrow, but it is midnight, right? Here in Brazil we celebrate on the 24th (to 25th).
Will get back in a few hours! Thanks for helping me with the mirrors.
Yeah, sorry that I said colorband in the original post 
. I wasn’t looking at my example then. Well, happy experimenting and Merry Christmas!
Thanks, Ray_theway! I would like if you could take a look at this link:
http://www.geocities.com/marcanth2001/blender/correct_reflection.html
Here I put a question about reflections. I would be very glad if you could help me.
Thanks,
Andre
Hmm, it looks like in both pictures that the point from which the envmap is being produced is not in the right spot. For the second method, I would select the sphere, go into the edit buttons, and click “Center New.” This makes sure that the center (or pivot point) of the object is at the geometric center of the sphere. This ensures that point of view is from the direct center of it. For the first method, do the same thing. Then, with the sphere still selected, press Shift-S and select “Curs – > Sel” (or something like that). Then select the empty and press Shift-S and select “Sel – > Curs.” This first puts the cursor at the center of the sphere, then moves the empty to the cursor (which is at the exact center of the sphere). Then free the data on your envmap and see if it renders properly. If not, I don’t really know what to do. Just experiment, I suppose.
Regarding the material, I think it looks like a very lovely envmap. Welcome to the wide world of chrome !
Thanks, Ray_theway! Well, you said something very important! My point is that… well, the empty is in the middle of the object, indeed. Altough it seems not to because of the way the maps appeared. I would like to ask you something… I have noted that the “z” axis of both empties (your images) are parallel to the “ground” and not pointing towards the camera… and the right one is pointing to the right… What is the correct way to position the empties? I guess that this is probably what I am doing wrong… I turned the “z” axis towards the camera.
Thanks for welcoming me to the wide world of chrome. Trying to learn…