Mirror Plane

Creates a direct mirror image of the scene as seen in those faces that are reflective.

Mirror Planes are not necessary when images are rendered with Ray Tracing turned On, which is the prefered option for generating true reflections. (Do this by enabling the Trace Reflections option in the Trace Tab page of the Render dialog.)

A Scanline Phong Renderer cannot calculate true reflections but by using a Mirror Plane any flat surface in the scene can be made to show a pretty good approximation to a true reflection, this may be enough for many scenes. (The Scanline renderer is very very much faster than the Ray Tracing renderer).

Mirror Plane Off Mirror Plane On

A mirror plane reflection works in a similar way to reflection in the ground plane but setting it up takes a little more work because unlike the ground which is always flat a mirror plane can be horizontal, vertical or lie at any angle at all.

Any triangular faces that are reflective and lie in the mirror plane will show a true reflection.

The mirror plane is specified by adding a texture texture axes which acts to define the plane of the mirror. Executing the Mirror Plane menu command offers you a selection of texture axes - choose one of them.

Once a mirror plane has been attached to one of the texture axes proceed to set the attributes of the faces that are to act as a mirror. These faces should be assigned a non-zero reflectivity and (most importantly) have their textures axis assigned to the same texture axis that the mirror plane is attached to.

Notes: