Creating Blurred Reflections and Refractions Using Standard Maya Shaders

Standard Maya shaders, such as the Blinn and Phong shaders, take advantage of mental ray reflection and refraction blurring to simulate realistic material behaviors. These options are available in the mental ray section of the shader's Attribute Editor. As you may have guessed, since these attributes appear in the mental ray rollout of the shader's Attribute Editor, the effect created by these settings will appear only when rendering with mental ray. They do not work when using other rendering options such as Maya Software.

Reflection Blur

Reflection blur is easy to use and is available for any of the standard Maya shaders that have reflective properties, such as Blinn, Phong, Anisotropic, and Ramp. This exercise demonstrates how to add reflection blur to a Blinn shader. This scene contains a space helmet model above a checkered ground plane.