HELP with mirrors required please

[Muggle]

Throwing out a line and hoping that Fletch is monitoring this forum as I need his help badly. Working on a render that includes a chandelier made of mirror. Can't seen to get it right in spite of using the mirror template in the materials editor. (Tried a few others as well.) Why is it coming out as a black blob please? Must upsetting.
Thank you.
PS - I am getting better little by little with Twilight.

[Walt]

Have you checked back faces?

[Muggle]

I think I did, but I am going to try again. Saw the email notification come in and leapt out of my chair! It was like Santa had arrived! I have been bombarding the thing with light from all angles to see if that would help. It has a little. What I wondered though, was if it was a face situation, why would the mirror on the right side look correct? Image still rendering hence the jaggies, but I wanted to try and catch you before you left the forum. If push comes to shove I will have to work it up in Photoshop but I know there is a correct way to do this.

[Walt]

What render setting are you using? Best with Easy 09

[Muggle]

Until I am ready to do the final pass through, I usually just use 3 as the items/models in my renders can be very intricate - like chandeliers... and they take forever to render on a higher setting, so only when I am ready to wrap it up do I move to 6?

[Chris]

What is behind the camera? It looks to me like the mirrors are reflecting just fine, it's just they have nothing to reflect. Did you model the room behind the camera or is it just open to a black background?

[Muggle]

Ummmm.... image applied to background. This is hard!

[Chris]

Sorry, I think there is a confusion (maybe).

Your mirrored surfaces are reflecting what is behind the camera. If you don't have anything behind the camera, there is nothing for them to reflect. Imagine you are the camera looking at the mirrors; what is behind you? You will see that in the mirrors. So unless you modeled something, or are using a spherical HDR sky, those mirrors will not reflect anything but black.

A note about the background you set in the TWR Environment editor: if you choose any of the types with "Background" in the name, then there is nothing behind you. You must choose spherical sky, or physical sky (or one of the other kinds of sky if you have the right kind of image).

Cool scene by the way.

[Muggle]

Thanks Chris, I still have a lot to learn, but hopefully I will get there sooner rather than later with help from people like you.
Ta.

[Muggle]

Tried this a.m. with a spherical sky - much better. Will work towards improvement. Thanks again for your suggestions and help. The black blobs are indeed reflection of some tree silhouettes at the bottom of the sky image. Now why did I not think of all of that.