I’m trying to create a retro reflector material that works with a 3rd person camera.
I can create one with a fresnel material if the camera is directly behind the light source like in real life.
However I want to fudge the effect so if I move the camera to a 3rd person view the reflections are still visible despite the oblique angle to the surface normals of the reflecting geometry and light source etc.
I was thinking of some way to bias the mesh normals towards the camera view dir (some sort of light source, to mesh to camera .product) for the reflection mask as the camera moves.
I’m pretty bad a math’s and any help with a shader solution to keep the retroflection effect strong while the camera angle move out of alignment with the light source will help.
IDK you might use a copy of the light source at the camera position and also targeting at the … “target” and using nodes for thsi light source to setup a light shader using the Light Path node to only have it visible for the camera which is your wanted behaviour and not illuminating the scene… ??
Hmm… testing… okay… not so easy maybe some more vector math work… between the camera and the lightsource and the object…
I figured out a simple solution… using a vector node and input it into the vector the fresnel and I can bias it towards the camera angle. I don’t need it to move with the camera but I figure I could drive the rotation with cos sin maths to get the angle between the lights and the camera if I wanted to move the camera.
The effect (minus inverting the fresnel to flip the lighting
maybe some more vector math work… between the camera and the lightsource and the object…
