I finally arrived in the textures tutorial (altough I had already read some of the lessons to texturize the models I did).
One of the lessons, about creating water surface, required the use of yafray (Yet Another Raytracer). I downloaded the latest version (0.0.9) and I tried use it, but blender crashed whenever I was to render an object. I further discovered that this problem was related to the different version of the compilers used by Blender and Yafray plugin. As I don’t want to download the source to recompile both with the same compiler, I overcame the problem using a xml exporter, that allows blender to export a xml file as a input to yafray [1].
After setting yafray, I tried to finish the lesson [2]… without sucess. I still don’t know which step I did wrong in part because I didn’t know what I was doing! Yes, I’m following these texture tutorials like a recipe. If I knew about the steps I was following, I could probably detect the mistake.
So, prior to anything, I decided to study about the basic concepts that make texturing possible. The first thing I’m investigating is about the three main color types: diffuse color (Col), specular color (Spe) and mirror color (Mir).
I then created a plane and set “Col” to blue, “Spe” to red and “Mir” to green and set “Ray Mirror” to [0.3]. I rendered the same image with different background colors. In the images below we can “see” each of the colors.
By these results, we may observe that the mirror color acts like a filter: it reflects the colors in the enviroment (the background in the case) after filtering with “Mirror Color”. Thus in the white background (red + green + blue) it’s supposed to reflect green, but in pink (red + blue) it’s suppose to reflect nothing.
It’s interesting to note that the area affected by the light isn’t green (as expected since the source of light is white). It means that the mirror does not work for lights. Since we cannot see the source of the light directly, it makes sense for us not be able to see its reflex too.
