Hi, I’m Benjamin Sokomba Dazhi and I welcome you to this iClone 8 (iC8) tutorial where we are going to talk about how to enhance your scenes visually using reflective surfaces in iClone 8.
The new features of iClone 8 includes a Mirror Plane Shader that simulates realistic reflective surfaces that can be applied to mirrors, televisions, floors or windows. You can define the mirror shape by Opacity texture, and adjust the strength and clarity of the mirror reflection with the Material Settings.
Let’s get to it.
Already, I have a character in my scene which I’ve set up with lights placed at different Interior furniture. The goal here is to create reflective surfaces like the mirror and also make the floor reflective.
So the first thing you do is you click on PLANE. I’ve already imported a Plane to the scene and set it up here. (Fig 1.0)
Go to modify.
Under Modify, go to Texture Settings. (Fig 3.0)
Here, you see the Shader Type is already on PBR. We want to change it to Reflection Surface as shown in Fig 4.0 below.
So once you click on Reflection Surface, boom! It starts reflecting as shown below in Fig 5.0. Now you can see the mirror and the characters reflection through it. It’s as easy and straightforward as that.
You can also tweak or modify the mirror.
This can be achieved by changing the Opacity of the mirror. You can put a different type of Opacity just so it doesn’t look too clean or sharp.
Once you play with the Opacity you can put a different Material or Texture to make the mirror look like glass. If you play it you see it’s still reflecting. (Fig 8.0)
You can also modify it further by using Diffuse color, Reflection strength, Reflection blur etc… but on this particular mirror surface, you don’t need the reflection to be blurred.
Another easy way to create a plane with reflection is to go to Create, then Reflection Surface. Once you click on it you should see a Reflection Surface in the scene right there. (Fig 10.0)
Next, resize the Reflection Surface to the shape or size of the object you want it on as in this case the mirror as shown below. Or you can reshape it to what you prefer and place it wherever you want.
That’s another easy method that is quite straightforward. We can delete it for now since we already have the reflective surface we previously placed.
Next thing we are going to work on is the Floor. As you can see we just have a basic floor. What we want to do right now is try to make it more reflective.
You might think it’s already reflecting from the image shown below but not quite. It’s only reflecting the light in the scene and has more to do with the roughness of the floor material. (Fig 12.0)
Same as before, click on the floor or the plane on the ground.
Go to modify. (Fig 14.0)
I have my textures already set under modify. So go to Shader Type under texture setting. Click on PBR then go to reflection surface again. (Fig 15.0)
As you can see below, it’s already reflecting but in this case you can see its more blur because I tried making it blur so it doesn’t have a water or glass feel. It needs to look like a marble floor.
How I did that is I went to the Modify Panel and under Shader settings I played with the Reflection Strength. (Fig 17.0)
Just as mentioned, you can increase or reduce the Reflection Strength using the slider highlighted in Fig 18.0 below.
You can pick a value of maybe say 47.
You can also increase the Reflection blur from 47 but it shouldn’t be too blurry, but it really just depends on what you’re looking for. I don’t want it to be too sharp so it doesn’t look like a glass or mirror hence the selected value.
We can also change the Diffuse Color too.
I made it darker but you can make it brighter. I just decided to make it a little bit darker as that’s how you get this particular reflection created in the scene below. (Fig 19.0)
Finally, let’s review and see all the effects we have added:
The character is reflecting, everything in the scene is reflecting from the furniture to the ceiling, and the good thing is that you can still see that the material/texture of the floor is still there. From the final scene render, through the camera view I created, you can see that both the mirror and the floor are now reflective.
So this is how you create reflections in iClone 8 to enhance the visuals in your scene. It really gives it more life and realism and makes the whole project more interesting.
I hope this tutorial was straightforward and I hope you can use this to make more beautiful and realistic scenes in your projects using iClone 8.
Thank you for having me again.
Goodbye until next time!
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