SimpleReflection | This node is used to create reflective materials. |
This shader is used to mimic reflective materials by calculating the direction of reflection for each point of an object's surface and looking up the color of the environment in that direction. Instead of shooting rays through the scene, a special texture is used that is supposed to contain a full 360 degree view of the environment. Therefore this technique is often called Environmental Mapping.
Due to the nature of the environment texture, no objects in the scene (including the reflective object itself) will reflect on the surface.
Unlike the other shaders, this one has no build-in default texture. The reason is that these kind of special textures (Cube Texture) are much bigger in memory size than the gradient textures. A cube texture contains the six sides of an environmental cube. To use this shader you have to link a Texture node with a DDS Texture Loader because cube textures can only be stored in DDS textures. This is the simple way. Alternatively you can create your own cube texture via six Image Loader nodes and the Images To CubeTexture node. Use the Diffuse value of a Material node to change the base color of the reflective material. The SimpleReflection Node has only one property called Reflectivity. Its value controls the strength of reflection.