reflection pass and other things that almost drove me to insanity.

as suggested by the title, i had to make the reflection pass for my assignment and it did almost drove me to insanity because i wasn't too sure on how to make it. but with the help of my supah awesome friend Andrew (Hi Andrew) i was able to understand it in a simpler way possible.

the idea of the reflection pass is to render out subtle reflections on the surface where the model stands. take this one scene as an example. we see here bobbie casting a shadow on the wall but at the same time casting his reflection on the floor. the reflection here is a bit too strong though but forgive me, its my first time having a ball at this.

the reason why i need a reflection pass is because the surface of my scene is quite shiny and it needs that subtle reflection to sell it more.

now to the important bit: adding the actual reflection pass. it was pretty easy once i learned how. it was just a matter of copying all of the exsisting elements from the scene and pasting them in the new scene with the label "reflection_pass". next is to tweak with the surface shaders and override the reflection limit (right click-over ride command) and just mucking around with the mental ray settings.

when you are rendering this, just go to passes, then click on the button that says create new and select reflection passes. dont forget to tick the claptrap on the bottom of the first screen to enable this on your layer.

and yes, approximate time of waiting for this to render is about an hour tops. which was good cause the whole time i was waiting for it, i had a good snooze to just get myself psyched up again.


 and here is what it looks like for the meantime:

it definitely needs to be re rendered with the shadows though. for some reason, the shadow pass didn't render out properly. but im happy with this outcome.

overall, i've finished with all of my scenes. just alot of tweaking to do and lots of colour grading/matching and sound effects. i plan on finishing this assignment early on so i can just fix bugs and all that before submission date. hopefully, i can get alot of stuff done for my assignment over the week im away for adelaide that way theres much less hassel to do for everything else.

whoo, final 3 weeks to go. i really cant see myself finishing just yet. ;)

more soon. til next time :)

trish! x