Faking reflections

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but SU 4.0's image mapping is a great way to fake reflections.

Please see attached.

-wehby

And here's the skippy.

As you'll notice, I used the cameras from Film&Stage. Helpful, but not necessary. You could also do the same thing with a line representing camera on one end and target on the other, then using the click-and-hold-drag-release method of Position Camera.

The tricks I used:

Rotate/Copy your camera (or line) 180 deg. about the point where it intersects your mirror. Then flip along direction parallel to mirror. Re-align if necessary.

Now, you don't want anything behind your mirror in the reflection map. So use a section plane aligned with plane of mirror.

Switch camera to 2nd location. Hide any construction lines or cameras (notice I forgot to do this). Activate section. Export 2d graphic. Import as texture. Use pins to align to mirror surface.

Switch back to 1st camera. Make sure section is not activated. Export 2d graphic.

"It came to me, as if in a dream."

-wehby

reflection.skp

Oh, yeah. Once I had it mapped properly, I turned down the opacity on my reflection map so that it looked more like glass than a true mirror.

@Last, you guys rock! See you Tuesday at the Live Demo.

-wehby

Nice, but a bit tricky? It only works for one camera positions, not?

Another quick and dirty mirror trick is to make an actual copy of your model and flip it along one of the axes, like on this image where you can see part of it "under the sea".

It works with all camera anfgles, but it doesn't give you the right shadows.

It might also be "expensive" on the resources if it's a detailed model..

Here's a faux reflection I had to do in a rush today. I just made the water translucent and made an upside-down mirror copy of the model under the water surface.

I had to cheat the shadows because the sun falls on the wrong surfaces of that upside down portion of the model, so I exported 2 shots, one with shadows (to use for the top half) and one without (to use for the reflection).

Haha, I open a bunch of threads and then read through them slowly. I should refresh before I post ;-)

Anyway, here's a detail of the reflection in the finished image after some quick work with an eraser in Photoshop

While I admit that a serious limitation of the method that I propose is that it is limited to one camera location, I believe that it has benefits too. Once I got the method down, it was a quick, easy process.

My images shows two of them:

The unique ability to both show the reflection and what lies beyond the semi-transparent, reflective surface.

The ability to have a small, reflective surface that does not represent a continuous plane. In my example it's a box that you can see around.

While your examples work great for bodies of water, they wouldn't be very practical for above-ground swimming pools.

It's nice to have options, though. I'll put the duplicate objects trick in my toolbag, just in case.

-wehby