May 23, 2015 : Animating With A Mirror – Follow Up
Based on a comment from my previous post ‘Animating With A Mirror’, I realized I did not discuss how I actually made the reflections. The technique is pretty straight forward but worth mentioning.
I decided not to use a mirrored surface in Lightwave – dealing with reflections greatly increases render times. Instead, I opted for a fake reflection with the help of After Effects. I first needed to create an extra render in Lightwave, which would be from the point of view of the mirror.
After that, it was time to put things into After Effects. I made a new solid (which I called Reflection’), and masked out the mirror. Below shows an example.
The mask is used with a Track Matte, something I use often, to appropriately project the Lightwave reflection renders onto the mirror glass. Below shows a series of these layers:
The last step to accurately create the mirrored look was to flip the image horizontally. That makes it appear like a reflection. Below is a nice example which also has depth by showing a reflection not inherent in the main shot.
And that is pretty much how I create the mirror look for the scene. At times, this technique became tedious – particularly when there were a lot of items/ objects in the shot; however, it was easily manageable, and I was able to control the various layers as needed.
posted by Pi Visuals at 1:58 am
Tags: Shapes