So far you haven t seen convincing glass surfaces in your renderings. This is because the materials you have made do not account for light reflecting off surfaces or passing through translucent surfaces (refraction). To simulate such phenomenon, you will use the raytracing renderer. (The raytracer has been built into VIZ for several versions, and it is used in the form of the Raytrace map or the Raytrace material). You cannot see raytraced effects in the viewports they must be rendered.

You will now create accurate reflections on a surface by using raytracing.

An element in the interior that can use some attention is the glass itself. Right now, the glass appears totally transparent, but in real life, the glass would reflect the scene around it. A quick way to make shiny objects look better is to use bitmaps in the Reflection channel, but since they reflect a generic photo, they leave something to be desired. Bitmaps used in the Reflection channel reflect the bitmap itself in the shiny parts of the object to which the material is assigned. In the real world objects do not reflect a generic image (of the sky, or of a building for example); they reflect the actual objects in the room.

If you are looking to produce the greatest accuracy, you ll be happy to know that it is possible to reflect what is actually in the room. To produce such an effect on the glass, you can use what is called...