Making a Model Reflect the Environment

« Defining Materials In EDGE | EDGE User’s Guide | Exclude A Model From A View »

Simple directions

1. Give your model material a high shinyness value (or exponent)
2. Enable environment reflections in the lighting effects menu (right click)

What's really going on

Environment reflections are not to be confused with a mirror reflection. In EDGE, mirror reflections are possible, but not commonly used. They are per polygon and require a render pass per mirror surface so they can be very expensive if your mirror is anything more than a simple plane.

Environment reflections on the other hand are very common and allow the environment to reflect in shiny materials and also add to their diffuse color. If you make a material shiny enough, EDGE will reflect the elements that have been designated in the environment map reflection tree. Another thing that will happen is that blooming will also occur on those materials.

The color of the bloom is affected by the specular color. For example, in the gold foil from HTV, the blooms appear to be yellow, while the blooms coming off of the Columbus module on the ISS are white in color.

Materials with a very high shinyness will reflect the environment very clearly, almost like a mirror, whereas a less shiny surface will have a dull reflection to it.

The elements reflected in the material are configured in the speedtest configuration. You can see an example of this in the configs/speedy.cfg file. By default, EDGE only reflects the Earth in the environment reflections. If you wanted to reflect even more you could create a custom speedy config file and change the REFLECT_TREES to include other trees/nodes. Obviously there would be performance hit for that, but it might be useful for something like a movie.

« Defining Materials In EDGE | EDGE User’s Guide | Exclude A Model From A View »