Hi clickclickbang,
It all depends on the complexity of your scene (number of objects and texture of each) and the length of your animation,
prepare to pay a heavy price on rendering, as reflection (mirroring) takes much longer than normal animation.
I personally would make a an image sequence (or even use some footage, depending on what you want to reflect), then use it as an image map after reversing it (so it looks mirrored). This trick will be much faster than reflection, and because you use image sequence, you can have multiple texture layers to achieve the final look you aim.
We sent a few scenes to a rendering farm, they all came quick, except for one which had reflected shop front glass, it took 3-4 times as long.
jaffer
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by: s0ulPosted on 2006-02-01 at 12:09:59ID: 15847166
Answer from korben
Date: 08/24/1999 05:47AM CET
There are so many ways you can go about getting a correct reflective surface.
First of all, consider specularity. Specularity is important for reflective surfaces as almost all reflective surfaces have the shiny 'hotspot' effect. A high specularity (200 %) with a high gloss, is good for glass, while low glosses and colour highlights turned ON are used for metals. You can also make a 'smudged' specular effect (as if an aluminium wrapper has been handled a lot) by giving it high specularity, with a fractal noise specularity texture. Fiddle with the settings on a ball to see what I mean.
Next, reflections. To get a good metallic type texture, the diffuse and reflection setting should add up to 100 %. For example, your object is 80 % reflective, it should have a diffuse setting of 20 %. Also, high specularity, with low gloss and COLOUR HIGHLIGHTS turned ON.
Your object may look dull and flat. The problem is, you need something for it to reflect. A good way to get a standard all-round chrome appearance is as follows: Let's say you want to make a chrome ball. Model it, give it a surface name ("chrome" would be highly original :) then load it into layout. Now, create a box about twice as big as the ball. Flip all its polygons so they are pointing inwards, and give it a surface of its own - "Black". Ie. You're going to colour it black :) Load the box into layout, scale it to something huge, and position to camera to be facing the ball. In the objects panel, select the box. check UNSEEN BY RAYS, and uncheck all the shadow options down the bottom. In surfaces, make the box completely black, turn diffuse right down to zero. Turn the ball's reflectivity up to 80, and diffuse down to 20. If you like, try the smudgy specular effect I mentioned above. Make sure the ball's reflection options are set to RAYTRACING AND BACKDROP. In EFFECTS panel, turn on Gradient Backdrop, and render the scene. The ball has that nice 80's chrome look about it.
A good way to make an old, corroded metal is this: Start with the standard sized ball (1 metre diameter). Load it into layout. Give it a diffuse texture, fractal noise, size 0.1 metres in all axis. Contrast 2. Texture value, 30%.
Give it the same fractal noise texture in specularity and reflection channels also. Render it and have a look. Not bad, huh?
Basically, I think you need to make sure your wrappers have heaps of curves and bumps (too smooth, they'll simply look overly flat). Give them high specularity, try turning colour highlights on and off. Offset reflection increase by a decrease in diffuse. And either set up a background for the wrappers to reflect, or give them a nice photoshop clouds image as a spherical reflection map.