Reflecting Fur and Paint Effects

# 1 20-02-2003 , 12:47 PM

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I am fairly new to Maya and am very impressed with the paint effects engine and fur engine. I require to reflect both paint effects and fur but since they are done post-render this is not automatic.

I know I could model the hair (why I'm using paint effects) by mapping poly-strips but the hair looks really great in non-raytrace renders.

Is there a proven (and convincing) method for dealing with reflections and refraction of fur and paint effects? I've heard about compositing images after post-render but am not sure how you would do that with maya. (I'm using Maya4.5)

Would I need to get Maya Fusion or something like Adobe Aftereffects for compositing? and how would I go about it from the maya end?

Hope someone can help

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# 2 28-02-2003 , 11:28 AM

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Well, I haven't done this myself, but I suppose you could render the scene from the point of view of the reflective object, then use that render as a reflection map on the object.

Get what I mean?

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# 3 28-02-2003 , 12:33 PM

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Yes I've been playing about doing things like that. It works really well for stills but its a pain when rendering an animation with moving cameras and objects.

Is there a renderer out there which will do such a thing without the need for this special treatment. I imagine the ones that can are all proprietory. Reflections/refractions of fur in the animated film Ice Age are the type of things I am trying to acheive. I know Blue Sky have there own renderer (CGIStudio).

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# 4 28-02-2003 , 01:22 PM

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Yeah, but no I don't think it's possible.

Blue Sly may not even use Maya fur, it could be their own or something like Shave and a Haircut.

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# 5 28-02-2003 , 02:45 PM

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True - they'll almost certainly use custom shaders. I've used shave with Lightwave 6.5, didn't know it could load maya objects?

I'll keep on it in my spare time anyway - i'm a C++ programmer so might try my hand at some code to automate a reflectionmap generation for each frame. Problably doesn't even need C++ - MEL would probably surfice. Need to have a look into it.

Cheers

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# 6 28-02-2003 , 05:54 PM

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In fact, this is a hard problem. I also tried to get the solution. But what I can do is just a little in Reflection condition.

Here is my idea:
1) complete what u want to animate in the sence;
2) save the sence as another one;
3) make the camera in the sence reflect it's position againt the mirror and hide the mirror;
4) render the two sence respectively;
5) use the compositing software to composite the two animations.(According to geometry, the latter animation should contain the image in the mirror of the original sence but just in reverse. )

Unfortunately, I have no experience in this cast. So if you have no idea and have to go through it, try it.

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Reflecting Fur and Paint Effects

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