While I’m at it,
this project is an animation and I have animated everything and made it work with the first model of Garfield (although strange I couldn’t get the particle system to work with both…)
I have 2000 hairs with 200 children each for each model, when I try to render it using Strand - I don’t get a reflection in a mirror, but when I uncheck Strand - it takes about 35 minutes a frame to render and the hair is “glowing” in some strange way (which I can’t figure out how to turn off)
Is there someway to make it look like it does when “rendering with Strand”, not take as much time and not glow - and also be reflective? I find no information about using Strand and making reflective hair. Don’t know if I should look in the particle system or somewhere else…
I even tried converting it to a mesh, but then the hair doesn’t move when the characters move and It would take forever to apply them to a Vertex group for the animation…
Also, tried baking the Particle System or the Reflective Mirror in someway - without knowing that it would work. And that took a long time also, and I never used Baking before…
we already talked about reflections and hair check a few posts above.
strand rendered hairs can’t be raytraced (with the weird exception that they can still receive raytraced ambient occlusion if you leave the material traceable, i don’t know why that is), ie, they won’t appear in raytraced reflections (you’ll see a bald head, or a bald garfield in your case, in the mirror), or through raytraced transparent materials or in raytraced shadows. you have to use an environment map texture on any objects that are supposed to look reflective, if you want strand rendered hair to appear in the reflection. as chipmasque said, it’s not really a “reflection”, it’s a cheat. you tell the environment map texture the location at which it needs to take a snapshot of the environment (which will include characters with strand hair), and it’ll map the colors of the environment around the object.
the reason it takes so long to render when you turn off strand is that each of those hairs are now being calculated as geometry. why it would glow, though…
That guide was for 2.4 and I feel it’s a bit difficult to read something outdated when the new system looks alot different. Any other tutorials that explains Environment Maps and how to set it up?
Anyway, I tested the Environment Map. It looks a bit blurry and I’m not certain what I’m doing. I use texture that correspond to the “Mirror”, that part of the mesh. I add a camera or an object as a viewport and no matter what, it looks as if the viewport is up in the air or flying around and then I moved the object (this time a plane that was suppose to be the viewport) and positioned it front of the mirror and it looked at something that wasn’t there and then I moved it a bit and undid that and it went to totally blue (from some texture).
Is it just me or is this a simple idea that justs makes everything confusing? I understand the concept. I add a environment map, I set another “object” as the Viewport - what that object sees is what I’m seeing as the texture? With a camera it probably will look weird due to the different in Aspect Ratio between my Mirror and the camera and I couldn’t get it the same size, so I added an identical plane in front of the mirror and even moved it around (when it was the viewport) and it’s just black…
So, what do I have to do? And the pixelation on the mirror when it “does” work, although incorrectly - can something be done about that?
This is likely because your lights are set for raytraced shadows, or some other part of the scene uses raytracing of some sort. Raytracing is used extensively for various effects, not just RayMirror, so you’ll have to eliminate it entirely if you want the rendering to speed up without Strand Render. But at the same time you’ll be removing any reason for using Traceable hair, so you’re kind of defeating the purpose.
lol yeah, it’s not just you, but it’s also user-error when it doesn’t work. it CAN be a little tricky to make an environment map work the way you want it to sometimes (especially when your “mirror” is a non-manifold object like a plane), but it isn’t always. here’s what you do.
create the environment map texture. set it to influence mirror color. to fix the blurriness of the “reflection” you have to increase the resolution of the environment map; i find that low values (256-ish) are usually fine for most “reflective” objects that aren’t supposed to be perfect mirrors but rather just a glossy material, but if you’re expecting to see a perfect mirror, then increase the resolution.
set it to reflection coordinates, flat projection. set this object itself on a different layer, and make that layer visible. in the env. map texture panel, set the “Ignore Layer” to the layer that the mirror is on. you don’t want the object “reflecting” itself in the env. map, so you want it to ignore that layer.
ok, here’s the tricky part, with a planar mirror. create an empty to be the viewpoint object, and the way you place it is by mirroring the location of the camera from the location of the mirror. so say your camera is up 1 blender unit in the +z direction, and 2 blender units to the -y direction, then place your empty up 1 unit +z and 2 units -y, on the opposite side of the mirror plane. also, for some reason, i find that the +z axis of the empty needs to be facing the camera in cases like this to render what you expect to see, so you need to rotate it 90 degrees.
confusing? oh, my goodness.
unfortunately, it doesnt take into account ambient occlusion or environment lighting, and it seems to only realize there’s shadows in the scene when you’re using buffered shadows.
the idea when they created environment maps was to simulate reflectivity without having to raytrace anything, and not to create actual mirrors, for the most part, especially to mirror hair. look at Pixar’s feature films of the 90s, you hardly ever see a real mirror (if ever?). the Magic 8 Ball in Toy Story is the only place i can remember even seeing an obviously reflective material. that’s just kinda the rub of mirroring hair in CG
Since this is an animation,
this is what I’ve done:
The Camera is moving, so therefor I positioned the Empty at the opposite side of the Camera and made the Camera it’s parents - will that work? The Camera has a standard rotation of 90 degrees in the X axis, 0 on Y and Z.
I have a mirror (the one I used before) that has these properties now and it’s on its “own” layer, Ignoring that Layer.
Still, all I get is a blurry picture that’s black. Maybe I understood this wrong? Does the wall between the empty and the Camera make a difference?
I see that the wall made a huge difference, although - it might not be exactly correct anyway, but a step in the right direction. But is there someway to make it se through a specific object (like the wall); or I will have to remake the whole animation or fiddle with it. Or Maybe I’ve set it up wrong, you can see my settings in the picture above. The object that is supposed to be a mirror is having this Texture, if that’s correct.
yeah, so as you’ve seen the wall makes a big difference because the empty will be rendering what’s on the other side of that wall - black shadow. i don’t know that you should have the empty set as a child of the camera, i don’t know that it’ll render the correct perspective as the camera moves. i think it should be like an inverse parent… like the camera moves away from the mirror, so should the empty, kind of a thing. you may be able to accomplish that with a child of constraint on the empty (i can’t remember offhand if it can be set to inverse, and i won’t be able to get into blender tonight to fiddle with it), or you could use a transformation constraint on the empty.
in edit mode, you can select the wall that needs to be ignored and hit P to separate it, then put that wall on the ignored layer.
edit: meh, nevermind, i guess child of can’t be set to inverse. use a transformation constraint.
This is how I set up, and I still can’t get any results whatsoever. If I move the camera “in front of the Wall” (even though it’s on the layer that’s ignored by the Environment Map) in the mirror you can se a shot from “under” the Lamp that is standing next to the Mirror.
I’m getting confused, I thought that this was to make a 360 view of the environment and depending on where the Mirror is standing - it will figure out where it should show a shot from in the mirror.
check a few posts above.
