Floor reflections?

[Kevin Camp]

you may want to check out andrew kramer’s preset for easy 3d reflections and it’s video tutorial. if you are able to precomp the images that need to be reflected together, you may only need to apply the preset to the precomp to get fairly believable reflections.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Matthew Abourezk]

Excellent, will take a look. THanks a bunch,
Matt

Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617

[Matthew Abourezk]

Rats, doesn’t work for me. The problem is, the comp layer that I need to reflect is using the CCCylinder filter. As such, the back wall I am creating is curved, nearly half round. The preset doesn’t know what to do with that. It is only good on squared off items, sitting directly on the 3d floor….

Thanks for the heads up though, great page and site with a lot of helpful stuff.

Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617

[Kevin Camp]

i played around with cc cylinder and andrew’s easy reflection preset… i had some success. i had to apply the preset to the layer that had the cc cylinder effect (rather than applying to a precomp that contained a layer that had cc cylinder applied), so the workflow may be more tedious than i had originally thought (i’m not sure of the structure of your comps)….

but, to get the cylinder effect to appear to reflect properly (well… with some limitation) i had to move it to the bottom of the effect stack, after all the fx_relfect effects. this gave a pretty realistic reflection as long as the camera angle was even with or higher that the cylinder or the cylinder appeared to be tilted toward the camera. the reflection became unrealistic once the camera moved below the cylinder or the cylinder was rotated back away from the camera….

to get the reflection to appear off the bottom edge (to give the appearance of being higher than the reflective surface), i added the offset effect under the first fx_reflect effect (bellow linear wipe, but above cc repetile). then just adjusted the vertical offset an amount that made it look fairly realistic.

so the effect panel is ordered like this:

fx_reflect1 (linear wipe)
offset
fx_reflect2 (cc repetile)
fx_reflect3 (cc composite)
cc cylinder

but due to the limitations i’m seeing, you may end up having to do this manually by duplicating the layers to be relfected, then flipping them and making opacity adjustments, blurs, etc. i would need to study the reflections a little more, but if your camera is moving, you may also need to make angle rotation adjustments to the cylinder reflection that counter the camera angle to get realist reflection movement…. but if the shot is quick, i think i might just use a little more blur to hide imperfections and shoot for the impression of reflection rather than reality….

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Matthew Abourezk]

Hey Kevin, thanks again for your input.

I have a workflow that sort of does the job. As you mentioned, just duplicating the CC Cylinder’d comp, blurring the duplicate, sliding it down to the floor area, reducing opacity, etc… seems to do the job well.

I just wish that I could pic-whip the rotation of CC Cylinder so any changes I make to keyframes in the main level are “reflected” (pun) in the duplicated level….

This will work for me, but it sure seems like there would be an easier answer… such as “Make a 3d floor and set the reflectivity to high”.

Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.
http://www.talkingboxdmg.com
(203) 327-6617

[Serge Hamad]

Hi,

You should take a look at “Reflector” from zaxwerks dot com.

Salut,
Serge

“InvigoMany-Winter” is now available https://www.nyc-visual.com/invigomany-winter.html
Invigorator/Proanimator Training: https://library.creativecow.net/articles/hamad_serge/invig_training.php

[Kevin Camp]

you can link the just the rotation values if you enable expressions for the rotation parameters that need to be linked, then use the expression pick whip to link them….

i created a ‘virtual set’ (more like a background for live keyed talent) element that was several cc cylinders stacked on top of each other to look like a stack of tv screens arranged in cylinders of varying sizes. to get easy control of all the cylinders, i linked the y & z rotations and xyz position for the cylinder effects to the y & z rotation and position of a single 3d null, then just manipulated the null (each cylinder had its own x rotation rate).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Richard Borge]

How do i get these effects (cc RepeTile cc Composite). i dont seem to have them in my effects folders.