How do I get an object to only show in a reflective surface?

Upirium

I'm trying to do a pic of this scene, where there is a mirror that, normally, would be facing an empty space. So it would pretty much just render nothing.
So I am trying to put a wall there so that it will show up in the reflection but every time I try to render the wall appears in front of the scene and doesn't show up like the scene I have pictured; i.e how I want it to...
Any help?
Using Poser if it isn't obvious by the screenshot...

evilproducer

You mean the wall blocks the camera's view of the room? You could move the wall back and out of the way of the camera. A little virtual forced perspective if you will.

sriesch

To add to evilproducer's comment, if moving the wall farther back makes it too small to show up properly in the mirror, you could also make it unrealistically large to compensate for it being unrealistically far back to try to correct the reflection.

One could also make a fake reflection that is actually just a nonreflective surface with the reflected image painted on it, but that would probably be really hard to get set up correctly.

Upirium

I think I managed to fix it. I tested some settings and when licking on the wall I unchecked 'visible in camera' and this is what it came up with, so.. I'm assuming it worked?

sriesch

Looks good. (adds just the right flavor to the scene!)

Richard Haseltine

Oops, wrong application - sorry.