Maya soft reflections

[ricgreen]

If you look at the following images, you can see that the reflections of the parots are blury. I was wondering if there is a way to do this effect in MAYA. I'm thinking that the people who did this animation used some kind of compositing trick.

What do you think?

Thanks

Richard

"Show me your rendering and I'll know your skill"

[perseus2]

Try using different types of maps on the reflectivity channel. Maybe a soft fractal would do it. A black-to-white ramp will make the reflection strongest at the feet, and fade away as it goes deeper.

You can also do this in post by rendering the reflection in a separate pass.

[waboflex]

You can't blur reflections like this in Maya unfortunately, you'll need to composite the reflection and blur it in post. Most other apps can do this - maybe, just maybe, Maya will have it one day. Are you reading this A|W? Please?

There's also a soft-reflect plugin on this site I think, though I'll be honest and say I could never get it working, all it did was put render times through the roof...

[heydiddlediddle]

The people who did this used reflection mapping. Sort of like the way Renderman creates reflection maps. Make a reflectionmap per frame at a fairly low resolution, map it as different types of environment mapping (planar and cubic most likely). If you noticed, the reflections where the feet touch the floor should be sharp and blur as it the distance between floor and object becomes greater (if it were a true raytraced soft reflection). you could do it in maya, but you would have to composite. Render a mirror camera (i.e. the beauty camera is at 0,5,0, the mirror floor is at Y=0 and without rotations that would cause the floor to angle going away from Y=0, the mirror camera would be down is up (upside down) at 0,-5,0 with the rotations a mirror image of the beauty camera. render that, and composite it blurring the reflection pass. A simpler method of doing the same thing would be group everything in the scene except the beauty camera, duplicate it after you're done animating everything, mirror it on the Y axis, hide the floor, render it, composite it on a floor that has transparency. If you floor is rotated on X or Z, it gets a but tricky since reflection maps are created in object space and not global space. I'm doing a scene now in a similar way. a hallway with a shiny reflective floor, only the floor is transparent, and there is a duplicate hallway scaled Y=-1.

still working on the maps a bit (not going for photoreal) but you can see it here: http://dwkim.org/gallery/outsideLabHallway.jpg

no area lights an ambient, two spots and a directional light and straight out of the renderer with no raytracing.