I made two spheres that I wanted to make metalic and reflective.
Starting with the first sphere, I added an empty at it’s centre and moved the sphere to layer 2. I gave the sphere an enviroment texture based on the empty and not rendering layer 2.
No problem so far. I get a picture of two spheres - one dull, and one reflecting the other sphere and everything else around it in it.
Here comes the problem… I try to do the same to the other sphere, but move it to layer 3, and now both spheres get their reflection environment maps, but in the reflections you can see everything except the two spheres.
In other words, place some cubes and stuff around in layer 1 and they get reflected OK, but the spheres refuse to reflect each other.
To answer the obvious question: No, I only have the relevant boxes checked for “don’t render this layer” in the respecttive environment textures. That is, the texture for sphere 1 only ignores layer 2 and the texture for sphere 2 only ignores layer 3.
I don’t believe you can have a reflection of a reflection in Blender. That would require a ray tracer (for the multiple light bounces that would require) and Blender uses a scan-line renderer.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. I don’t need a reflection of a reflection, I need two objects to reflect.
Reflections of reflections are possible, BTW, by choosing static enviornment maps and alternately freeing the data on the different objects and re-rendering.
I had a problem with a chrome wheel reflection once that would not reflect the inner fenderwell, which in reality would have reflected in this wheel. I moved the envmap empty around until it resided somewhere deeper inside the fenderwell (off the wheel’s center, where you would think it should be) in order for it to reflect more correctly. Perhaps something like this is happening in your world. Have you tried moving the empties around to see what happens?
Kind of. It only seems to reflect the other sphere if said sphere is put in layer 1 and given a non reflective surface. I can then save that map and load it as an image and do the same with the other sphere and so on back and forth until the desired level of recursion is reached. I just don’t understand why it won’t reflect reflective objects in other layers.
OK, here’s the deal. I figured it out , and it seems to be a Blender Bug. So everbody using Env Maps for reflections take note:
Depending on the layer that you put objects in, environment maps will either see them or not. All objects can be seen in the render with all layers selected, but the environment maps will not always see everything they are supposed to. Strange thing is, the map will see some things in say layer 3, but not everything. Strange eh?
I tried moving objects around from layer to layer and finally found a combination that worked. Don’t ask me if there is any logic behind it, I have no idea. Anyway, it is nice to know that I’m not going insane, and it was just a Blender “feature”.
, and it seems to be a Blender Bug. So everbody using Env Maps for reflections take note: