DJ Wiza <Kil### [at] sohcahtoanet> wrote:
> First, why would the reflections of the floor show up brighter than the
> floor itself?

I'm not quite sure i understand where you're talking about.  Are you talking
about the reflections of the black tiles?  (With an ambient of 1, the white
tiles are already as bright as anything can show with this rendering
model.)

Do you have non-zero diffuse and ambient values for the "spheres"?  If so,
then what looks like a lightening of the black tile reflections could be
the color (pigment value) of the sphere itself showing through.  This is
actually the way most specular surfaces work in real life, so is not
necessarily an "error."  If you use a copper mirror, for example, all the
reflections in the mirror will have a reddish brown cast to them.
Likewise, reflections in a silver or chrome sphere, unless they are
extremely highly polished, will have a white to light gray tint to them.

In real life, there's only so much polish you can give to a metal surface.
And if the metal is colored, the color of the metal will _always_ show
through, as reproduced by POV-Ray's metallic keyword.  That's why we
stopped using copper and speculum and switched to metal-coated glass when
the technology was developed.

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