Setting a color for the background doesn’t seem to work. Unless I’m doing something wrong.
Also, the black plastic material has, by default, it’s reflection setting set to 100% but it shows no reflection. What can I do about that? The client wants to see a highly reflective black plastic, not a dead matte black. I tried making a black metal but the same thing occurs.
Thanks.
Background in an environment is used only when there is no background image in it specified.
You probably meant to set a background color in the Rendering panel under the Backdrop section.
I don’t sww pitch black with a black plastic like you do. Can you attach a stripped down version of your model with only one surface and your black plastic material?
I will post something later. This morning I have to crunch this project out so I’m going back to V5 and Thea to get it done
I’m intrigued by the rendering capabilities of V6 but also frustrated. Why so few controls in the materials?
A user should be able to adjust the black plastic to have the same reflective qualities of the metal shown in my image.
This is the type of surface the client is expecting:
Sorry about that - that’s so that people like me can get something out of it… 
A node - based materials editor is in the works and I suspect that people that know what they are doing will use that instead. Not sure when or if that will be in RH6 though…
For plastic this works just fine - and really, if it is metal you’re after you could use just metal as well…
Note though that you need something in your model or environment for reflections to show.
Clearly I have a lot to learn about V6. First of all, I see no change when I select Solid Color.
For reflection, I built a colored cage around my object. I get no reflections of the cage at all in V6. I took it into V5 and cranked up the reflections in Thea and rendered and I get reflections as expected.
This is frustrating because the work I do depends on quick, fast renders. The image in V6 looks great but it’s kind of a ‘what you see is what you get’ - no modification possible. The chrome material in V6 looks better than the chrome in Thea or V-Ray and at no cost in time. But it doesn’t reflect anything except the environment image. And the black plastic reflects almost nothing.
The first image is V6, the second is V5 with Thea
What viewport mode are you using? Is it some custom mode based on shaded or rendered?
Note that the Rendered viewport mode doesn’t do object reflection. If you really want object refleetions you need to use Raytraced.
But it is hard to see what you are doing - file would be much more useful. If you can’t share it publicly, please upload using www.rhino3d.com/upload and use nathan@mcneel.com as recipient. I get notified automatically when the upload is completed.
/Nathan
Well that explains it. The viewport mode I’m using is Rendered so that’s why I’m not seeing reflections. And that’s too bad because the Rendered viewport mode in V6 provides an image that’s so close to a fully rendered image that it could make the need for other rendering engines obsolete.
Notice the light sheen on the black surface in the attached image and how it plays off the reflections from the side panels. That’s very hard to get in my third party renderers without a lot of fussing around and at the cost of rendering time. This is 90% of the way there with no time expended.
The Rendered display mode is great indeed, and it continues to receive great improvements.
The sheen you show in your attached image looks like the custom reflection environment. You should keep that definitely in use to give definition in your reflective surfaces.
