Let Us Now Praise Soft Reflections

[ZachBG]

Those of you who are familiar with my work know I'm not a render monkey--I love beautiful images as much as anybody, but I'm too impatient to wait for them (or to learn enough about lighting to make them). However, my recent Olympic vodcast got such a good response I decided to re-render the last shot, where Shaggy falls into an iced-over swimming pool. I used Image-Based Lighting for the general outdoor look, and decided to try soft reflections on the ice and see if it would look any good.

 

Hot DAMN!

 

This is with only 10% sampling on the soft reflections, and 9-pass multipass. It really looks like ice, doesn't it?

 

(Of course, at eighteen minutes per frame, I don't think I'll be doing it on a regular basis, but...)

[Dhar]

That looks so real, the bottom left corner of my screen is ice cold

 

Could you post a tutorial for this? Please?

[luckbat]

You might be able to fake it by only rendering the portion in the middle, where Shaggy and his reflection are visible. You could use a single still image for the outer portion of the shot.

[ddustin]

Dang, my ice scraper scratched my monitor........

 

 

Looks great!!

[noah brewer]

Wow, that does look nice. But what a render hit at 18 min...

[ZachBG]

Could you post a tutorial for this? Please?

Not much for a tutorial, it's just certain properties that I happened to get right.

 

The ice itself is at 50% reflectivity, 30% specular size, and 100% specular intensity, with a light blue diffuse color. I have a sky dome with a freely available sky image (follow the link from here next to "skydome.zip") over the whole scene to provide a reflection. And in the render panel, I have soft reflections ON with 10% sampling. That's it. I think the low sampling number actually helps it look more like irregular ice.

 

You might be able to fake it by only rendering the portion in the middle, where Shaggy and his reflection are visible. You could use a single still image for the outer portion of the shot.

That's a good idea, but later in the animation the ice cracks, and takes up pretty much the whole frame.

 

Wow, that does look nice. But what a render hit at 18 min...

It's probably a lot less on a decent machine.

[Zaryin]

That is pretty cool looking. You helped alot of people who want to make ice for still images. Might be a render hit, but at least it's only one frame that way.

[oakchas]

I'm shiverin! Hot DAMN indeed! Seems you've got the effect down cold!

 

It certainly does look nice!