11.3. Reflections and Refractions

You can either map or raytrace reflections. As you saw in Chapter 7, creating a reflection map for an object is pretty simple. Simply assign a Phong, PhongE, Blinn, or Anisotropic material to your object and make sure the Reflectivity attribute is greater than zero. Then click the Reflected Color map button to add a texture or a file as a map to create the reflection. (See the Axe project in Chapter 7 for more on reflection maps and shaders.)

To generate true reflections, however, you will need to enable raytracing. Mapping textures to the reflected color is not necessary when raytracing is enabled, as Maya will simply reflect any objects in the scene that fall in the proper line of sight.