How To Create Different Reflections?
Xenomorphine
Posts: 2,421
Toying with 'Useful Mirrors':
http://www.daz3d.com/useful-mirrors-for-daz-studio
The reflection shaders are excellent, but there's an idea in my head I wanted to put into practice. Namely, a character who's looking into a mirror which reflects the room and everything in it, but reflects a different type of character. Unfortunately, I can't quite figure out how to do it within Daz Studio, itself, short of some tricks with Photoshop - which I'd rather not resort to.
Thought there might be a way to 'hide' one figure, but make it reflect in a mirror and vice versa, but can't seem to find a way to do it... Anybody have any ideas?
Alternatively, I did find this:
http://www.daz3d.com/gothika-mirror
It does mention being able to create 'fake' reflections, but gives no details as regards how. Does anyone have any experience using it to generate that effect? Is it some variety of shader which could be applied to a completely different mirror prop? Not quite sure what a 'reflection map' would be.
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Comments
I believe you would need to render each character individually in a blank screen then merge them all together in Photoshop or Gimp
Yeah, that'd be my last resort. I'd ideally like to have the character posed actually touching the mirror, though. Would be hellish having to cut around them! Never able to quite do it right when I try and the end result usually ends up looking fake.
Why reflect anything?
The world is yours to create...so create.
Instead of a mirror, build a room on the other side of the wall...and mirror pose everything in it...and have the two characters...
Because I don't have a relevant room set with a small square hole in one wall to give the illusion of a mirror. ;) Otherwise, yep, I'd have just replicated everything and done the 'Terminator 2' method, just as you describe.
Here is a discussion of this issue with several ideas listed: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/20047/
To "hide" the other figure while showing its reflection: use the UberSurface shader and, on the Surfaces pane, turn Fantom on (and keep Raytrace on so that you'll still see its reflection)
To show a figure while hiding its reflection: Using the UberSurface shader, turn Raytrace off (and make sure Fantom is off)
This is described in one of the posts in the thread Sean Riesch linked to, but I thought I'd post it right here since it seems to be what you're trying to do.
I did something similar in this picture I did in Poser. The character in the mirror is just off-screen so that only the mirror can see her. If I had turned off "Visible in Raytracing" on the woman on the floor, along with her clothes and hair, you would've only seen her scary alter ego reflected in the mirror.
Greetings,
One thing to keep in mind is that reflections have noticeably lower edge resolution than non-reflected parts of a scene. Something about AA or pixel samples not happening for reflected objects, so you'll want to do some kind of post work tricks to keep that from being a problem anyway.
-- Morgan
Be careful with images like this. It might violate the TOS against violence. I had an image removed a long time ago that was not even this violent.
Edited to add: It is a great image, though. I like the candle smoke, too.
dont do refelctions.
Render the room and character that should be seen in the mirror. Then use that render (cropped if need be) as an image ON the surface of the mirror. Now set that up in the second scene and you can line up the hands of the two characters with ease.
And to quickly mirror image a rendered image on a surface, set horizontal tiling to -1 in the surface tab.
That is terrifying.
Just a quick suggestion on the how to do the fiddly cutting around the figure.
Render the two images you want to merge.
Go back to the scene that creates the image you will have to cut around.
Delete everything apart from the figure
Set the shader on the figure so they are as white as possible and set the background to black.
Render using the same camera you used before.
In Gimp/Photoshop, threshold the image so it is just pure black and white.
Use the black and white image as a mask when (re)combining the images in Gimp/Photoshop.
I have done this a couple of times to composite images. Works for me, maybe it will help?
Good idea, I never thought of that one! There might be issues depending on how many items need to line up in the fake reflection. I did one using the layered approach. Layering two renders and erasing what you don't need isn't as bad as it sounds. I avoid post-work like the plague, but I can wield an eraser brush with the best of them! The only fiddly bit in this image is the spaces between the fingers. The nice thing about doing actual reflections is it picks up all the little subtle details. Look closely at the edges of the mirror. The edges are reflecting the same zombie texture as the main mirror. I rendered as PNG files to preserve pixel level detail, and saved the final as JPG. I use PSP.
http://slimerjspud.deviantart.com/art/Lost-in-the-Asylum-299870116
Chris102's suggestion about masks looks promising too. In some cases, that won't work when there are shadows involved. In one render, I needed one character from one render with that character's shadows, then combine with another render with the other character's shadow.
Hmm... Can't seem to find an 'UberShader' in my inventory. Just an 'UberEnvironment' (which I've never known how to mess around with).
I did load Victoria 6 and Michael 6 to try the above directions, though. Weirdly, when selecting each of their surface tabs, V6 did have 'Fantom' and 'Raytrace' (but not 'Visible In Raytrace') options, yet M6 doesn't.
However, I hid V6 and turned the 'Fantom' and 'Raytrace' selections on, but it didn't seem to make any difference. The mirror only continued to reflect M6. V6 remained invisible in both 'reality' and reflection.
As for creating thresholds and masks and such in third party software... I'm afraid I'm not at all familiar with even those terms, much less how I'd go about them. :) Hopefully, there's a way to get this all done within the Daz Studio render, itself.
search for
!UberSurface Base.duf
Ah, thanks! Now those V6 options come up for M6, when it's been applied. Still not getting the desired effect, unfortunately.
If you want V6's reflection in the mirror, but have V6 invisible outside of the mirror, don't hide V6, show V6. The Fantom/Raytrace pair should do the hiding part for you.
Ah, gotcha'! Success! Fantom = show/hide in 'reality' and raytrace = reflectivity.
A huge thank you to everyone who's provided suggestions!