Realistic reflection

[Steve Roberts]

Have you searched the COW for “reflection” and “floor” together?

[James Miller]

Give this a bash

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/reflection_plug-in/

free and comes with a tutorial

If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t the sport for you.

[Ryan Stone]

Hi Steve,

I have indeed and I didn’t find anything that could help.

James, thanks for the link. I do actually already have VC Reflect, and whilst it works to a degree on 3D stationary objects, it can’t handle a rotating object.

Kind regards,

Ry

[James Miller]

Hi there.

In your example the problem was that the reflection was at an odd angle. If you watch the tutorial at 3:17 he goes over this problem.

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/reflection_plug-in/

I’ve made projects where the camera pan’s around the object and now had any problems. Am I misunderstanding what’s going wrong for you?

Cheers

If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t the sport for you.

[Ryan Stone]

Hi James,

Yeah I’ve looked at that tutorial. The problem is that a) the box doesn’t revolve and b) when you angle and then skew the reflection, it’ll fix and mirror one plane of the box but not the other – in this tutorial case, the angle of the DVD spine will still be wrong however it’s concealed, because he composites the reflection slightly higher and behind the original image. Something you can get away with as it’s a dark and not simple box, mine are brighter and you’ll notice if some of the reflection is missing.

In short, the angle/skew option will only fix one angle of the box 🙁

…unless I’m missing something important?

Thanks for your help though

Ry

[Kevin Camp]

[Ryan Stone] “b) when you angle and then skew the reflection, it’ll fix and mirror one plane of the box but not the other”

yep… it will work well enough if the layer is fairly flat, like the dvd case in the tutorial. but this has much more depth, and that technique doesn’t work well enough for some thing like this.

you may be able to use one of andrew’s 3d-projection techniques to build a cube that matches your object (at least the front and sides), then project your footage on the cube (make sure you set the light’s shadow diffusion to zero). then position and rotate the camera so that projected cube lines up if the footage as a reflection (of course you’ll need to animate the rotation of the cube to match the footage too).

i can’t imagine that you’ll get a ‘perfect’ result with something this (the fact that it’s not a simple, hard edged cube will be the issue), so i’d plan to have a soft and subtle reflection…

the other way, which may actually be faster and easier if you are/know the person who shot the footage… reshoot it with glass over the turn table.

i imagine that you had a green table and a green back drop. adding glass to the table would hopefully produce good enough reflections that could be retained when keying. just watch out for glare or unwanted set reflections that couldn’t easily be roto’ed out.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ryan Stone]

Thanks Kevin,

I’ve come to the same conclusion. I’ll have a look at the projection idea but I’ve got a lot of these units to do so may have to find something a bit quicker – and yes a subtle, blurred reflection is looking more likely.

Oh well,

thanks for all your help guys

Ry

[James Miller]

Hey I’m sure you’ve probably moved on from this now, but I made a 3d cube, precomp’d it, suck vc reflect on it, and spun it, and it worked. Looked like a table top. I might be missing something but it the hardest point was getting the anchor point in the right place. Anyway, hope you got there in the end.

If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t the sport for you.

[Javed Shaikh]

Checkout this tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HY_M8I65ZU

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