Piano Reflections Blender WIP

Richard_Culver · October 25, 2025, 7:51am

I posted this as old LightWave art in finished projects. I originally created this and was selling the print back in 2006.

Here is the LightWave file, I opened recently in LW 2015

And now, imported via .fbx to Blender, I will start recreating it here.

For Blender, I am using a hand rig and arms that I had for another project. It has a rigify rig.

So with the basic setup in place, now time to set up materials and lights.

Might have to UV the piano to do some painting on it for extra details.

I don’t want to go too over the top.

Might do something like this:

Still thinking on that.

Richard_Culver · October 25, 2025, 2:59pm

A long way to go with the render and materials. But real fun to see it start to come to life on the Blender side! All I did here was tweak some materials. The light and camera are from LightWave. I just changed the light to Area and pumped it up a bit.

Making the hands B&W.

I remember when I did this for print from LightWave I had to comp it in photshop because I could never get rid of all the rays on the piano side.

Playing with the reflection settings.

All for now!

julperado · October 25, 2025, 7:28pm

Nice to see the progress, you made me want to go back to old projects I started in 3dxMax or Maya back when I was learning, and re-make them in Blender now, I wonder how long that would take…

Richard_Culver · October 25, 2025, 8:32pm

Well, it’s been fun!

If you can put the time in, I am sure you would find it rewarding

Made me play hooky from other duties!

I have sooo many things I should be doing. So progress will be slow.

It did inspire a short film. So now I will have that nagging at me!

PS:

If anyone knows how to get rid of those rays being cast by the hands on the keys that would help with the animated version.

I am trying to have the hands show only in the reflection of the backboard.

I have tried all the usual visibility settings and can only see the reflection when it also shows these rays cast on the keys.

julperado · October 25, 2025, 9:06pm

I’m not 100% sure but I think you’d have to use different render layers and then composite them together

Richard_Culver · October 26, 2025, 2:55am

Yeah that’s what I did for the still version. Might be stuck with that and an animated mask for animation.

Or is there some node trick?

julperado · October 26, 2025, 1:21pm

I’m guessing this is what you did already? Leaving only Glossy checked on the Ray Visibility settings of the object?

You can achieve the same by mixing your material with a Transparent BDF and the light path node set to Is Glossy Ray as a mix factor, but you’d still get the reflections of the hands on any other object in the scene. I’m not aware of any other shader node trick to enable the reflections only on one object…

Richard_Culver · October 26, 2025, 1:35pm

Yeah. That is the solution I just found by searching. I am going to try it.

Richard_Culver · October 29, 2025, 6:10am

So the update is sadly as usual, I don’t have time to fuss with these little projects anymore.

I am going to start another thread as I have turned this over as a larger project to create the entire grand piano. I have a short film planned for it.

So I handed it over to my senior modeler who is already making great progress.

You can follow the progress here:

We will create a full realistic animated grand piano:

It will continue with the same ghost theme but expand on it a bit.