Haven’t figured out what I’m doing wrong. I can get a surface to emit light, but it doesn’t reflect on anything. Ideas?
Cheers.
If you mean by emit light to just turn the emit slider in the Material-Settings up, it won’t reflect. Its like BumpMaping. BumpMaping gives the Ilusion of Depht (a.e. dents on the surface) on a Mesh. And Emit just makes it look like it is emitting light. You can turn indirect-Lighting on to get something similar, but it will increase render-time a lot.
Never forget Alfred Hitchcock’s acting advice to Ingrid Bergman:“Ingrid, fake it.”
(She often said that it was the most practical advice she had ever received.)
When you are doing computer graphics, you do not have to actually mimic “reality,” and in most cases it is rather useless to try. What you want to do, instead, is to “fake it.”
Figure out where the light would go if it really were bouncing off the object. Then, put a light in the right position to cast a convincing-looking version of that lighting effect. (Remember, no one can see a CG lamp, even when it’s right in front of the camera’s nose.)
The human eye is pretty good at spotting … “that looks wrong somehow” … because those are the skills that help you spot the Tiger soon enough to avoid being the tiger’s dinner. But the eye is not nearly so good at deciding … “that looks right.” And it’s really not too concerned about it, either. So, be properly concerned about looking “wrong,” and not so concerned about looking “right.” (And, usually, “screw the physics.” 
) If it doesn’t look “wrong,” then it’s “right.” (Or at least, good enough to shrink-wrap and ship by deadline.)