Introduction

This is a brief tutorial to introduce you to real-world reflection mapping in Pixels 3D Studio. This technique is routinely used for movies and commercials sfx. This tutorial requires: Pixels3D | studio | v3.x A still camera or a DV cam A shiny chromed christmas ball (the bigger, the better) Photoshop, Painter, Color-It, etc A Free Photoshop filter named "ornament" available at :       http://www.flamingpear.com/download.html

First we need a background !

First, we have to take a picture of our background. It will become our lighting/shading reference. I took a picture of the 3d screening room at work using a nikon digital camera. If you have a camera tripod to lock the position and orientation of your shot, you will get better results. It just leaned againts a wall to get approximately the same angle between shots.

Sampling the real world...

Next, we'll place our chrome ball where our 3d object will be standing and grab a second picture. This x-mas ball was bought for approximately $60 to a company crafting street ornaments. The surface finish is not perfect and there is a visible molding seam, but it will hardly be visible in the final render. These problems can be taken care of in photoshop anyway. I zoomed in on the ball to get a better resolution, but to get the most accurate results you should avoid that. But again, nobody will notice the distortion introduced here, so let's continue...

Let's prepare our enviroment map...

First, we'll open our paint package and load in the x-mas ball picture. We'll start by cropping the ball to get rid of the rest of the picture.

Next, we'll run the "Ornaments" photoshop filter from Flaming Pear over our image. This little jewel will unfold the spherical reflection so that we may use it in Pixels:3D.

Back to Pixels:3D

The rest is pretty straightforward. I loaded a small faded-out version of my background in the camera view, loosely matched the camera's POV and placed a mesh corresponding to the top of the table. It will receive my shadows.

Next, I added a spotlight and some chromed geometry reflecting the real room. The spotlight matches the position of the windows in the room. I uses raytraced shadows with an area size of 75 to get progressive, natural looking shadows that would match with the background.

The chrome shader is very simple. our reflection map does most of the job, the rest is a matter of taste. the Image Map node was left to its default settings.

Results

This is just a quick intro to a technique that can get a fairly involved, especially for moving shots. You will find 2 movies showing the bug move. I used raytracing only for the shadows, the rest was rendered very fast. The shadow pass was color-corrected and composited in After Effects. If you look closely at the picture, you will see some reflections are not really matching the environment, but, hey, who cares : it just works ! Next time, we'll talk about a more subtle use of this technique

Downloads

final shots : T2-Chrome Flavor          Big (2.6Mo)          Small (816k) Natural Flavor                 Big (2.6Mo)          Small (824k) These shots were compressed with the animation codec to preserve the image quality