reflective surfaces

[dueyftw]

I have seen animation done so the is a reflective surface. I was wondering how it is done.

Dale

[fiziwig]

I've only seen that in ray-trace rendering. AS does not use ray trace, which is normally only seen in 3D applications. So the short answer is, in AS it can't be done.

--gary

[Víctor Paredes]

but with masks and blending tricks, it would be possible to do some fancy reflection effects.

[heyvern]

3D applications can mathematically calculate a reflective surface, but even with those programs people ask the EXACT same question; "How do I make something shiny and reflective?" It takes more than the click of a button even with 3D software. You have to consider lighting, and shadows, object color, the surrounding environment etc etc.

Anime Studio at its roots is a drawing program. You have to draw what you want to see. There are no shortcuts for reflective surfaces. If you want something to be reflective you have to know what makes something LOOK reflective and draw it that way.

If you had a character standing in front of a mirror you would just copy and flip the character and mask it inside a "mirror frame". Maybe adjust the transparency.

If you want a distorted reflection in a odd shaped object you might be able to pull this off using a very complex system of bones and layers to distort a copy of a character inside that shape to create the illusion of reflectivity.

-vern

[GardenGuy]

You can see an example of how I faked reflective surfaces (in ice) in my Happy Holiday Scene:

[url]http://www.gardenguy.keepandshare.com

I copied and then flipped each animated layer and reanimated that reflection to as closely match the action above. Each reflective layer was 30% opacity. I had to do some tricks to make it all look "real". For Example the black bird flying has a reflection, but in real life the reflection of the squirrel would block it for a moment when it goes behind the squirrel's head. Since both reflective layers (the squirrel's and the bird's) were see through I had to make the bird reflection layer disappear for the frames it was supposed to be behind the squirrel reflection. Notice also I put in a cloud reflection but you don't actually see the cloud in the sky since it's out of frame.

Needless to say that scene was a LOT of work but I think at least achieved an illusion of reflectivity

[AlanPS]

I like playing with Spots in the Styles menu. With spots you can create glass-type reflections that even to some degree "appear" to reflect light when the camera moves. You can use this for any type of reflective surface such as glass, metal, plastic, ceramic, etc.

You can even make outlines have Spots for things like floor tiles or window edges, so when the camera moves it looks like the light is hitting their edges.

The trick is making the spots have the right length, width, spacing, so that they appear to be streaks of light. Sometimes when you're trying to make them just right they look like big blocky refracted lines, which is not quite what you should be going for but it works for very cartoony-ish effects.

Be careful with camera movement though, because the illusion can quickly be killed.

[GardenGuy]

I like AlanPS idea with the spots. In the Happy Holiday Scene I have as the top reflective layer a transparent layer png picture of shaded streaks from white (completely see through) to dark gray (partial opacity) giving the illusion over all the reflections as being seen through striated ice. It makes the otherwise straight on "reflection" layers more natural with different "amounts" of reflection showing through.

I originally thought that transparent png pictures could only be used with a transparent cut-out section of the picture, until I realized that you could save levels of transparency that remain when you "look through" that png to another layer in AS. It makes setting up shadows for objects a breeze without having to create those shadows in AS itself (something difficult for me to do, at least with the Standard version since I can't skew or vector a layer)

[fiziwig]

Here's a thought that just occurred to me for water or ice reflections. Say you wanted some skaters on ice to have their reflections seen in the ice. Render the skaters as a series of PNGs, then take the PNGs into Photoshop and mirror them top to bottom and apply some blurring effects. Then make the mirrored version back into a movie in load that into AS as a bottom layer to be masked through the shape of the frozen pond.

I don't know if it would work, but it might be interesting to try.

--gary

[phastraq]

I guess you could do that but why not just duplicate and reflect the layers in AS then apply blur and transparency to them and place them underneath the ice layer?

That would appear to be faster for me. Also when you duplicate a layer you also duplicate it's actions and key frames right? or at least i think so. If so then that would make it easier still.