Reflective stuff is attractive...it's that simple (I think it's in our gene coding or something), but it's not as easy as you might think to pull off a visually compelling reflective piece in trueSpace, oddly, for exactly the reason why trueSpace's rendering engine is so sophisticated. TrueSpace uses raytracing, which is a fancy way of saying that an invisible shaft bounces from the viewpoint (the camera) to various reflective points within the scene, and then traces back to the camera's point of view to "report" that certain pixels in the finished rendered scene are reflections of objects in the scene. Let's just say that raytracing is an incredibly processor-intensive thing, and it's not always a necessary thing to make beautiful images.

(Digression #1: We are working at a disadvantage in this lesson because the object we will make reflective is a sphere. And a sphere shows EVERYTHING in crystal clear detail when it bounces a reflection back at the camera. Usually, reflective objects twist and turn and reflection get very distorted and it is easier to "fake" a reflection...as we will do shortly...with convincing results)

Let's check out this metallic property by applying it to the two spheres and then rendering it with raytracing enabled.

1.) With the big sphere selected, click on the metallic button on the shader map panel, and then click+drag on the material application pull-down, and choose the funnel—this applies the metal shader (material) to the sphere.

2.) Do step one with the smaller sphere.

3.) Now, right-click on the render icon on the toolbox (it's the little cube doober to the left of the views icon pull-down list). Make sure on the render options panel that pops up that Raytrace is checked.

4.) Drag on the face of the render icon and then choose the render scene icon.

As you can see in figure 25, the render is sort of a dud. You know why? There's nothing really in the scene to raytrace...nothing to reflect!