Fade Reflection With Distance

[wizlon]

Is there a easy way to achieve this?, I'am using a work around at the moment, with weight maps and gradients on the reflection channel. I know hyper-smooth will do it, but i don't want to spend any money.

Any help much apprieciated.

[Elmar Moelzer]

If you really only want to fade the reflection- strength with the distance to the camera? You could just put a gradient with the "distance to camera" as input- parameter into the reflectionchannel. I dont see the need to use weightmaps.
CU
Elmar

[Red_Oddity]

You mean a reflection of for example a chair on a reflective floor, and the only thing you see in the reflection are the legs of the chair, which fade from (the bottom) well visible to (the top of the chair) not visible anymore?

You could do it in post...
This is a simple trick we used to do with scanline renderers and for easy compositing (it give you max control over the reflection without rendering the whole sh**load again...and again...and again...

Quick and dirty reflection fade:

1 Parent everything in your scene (including lights) to a Null
2 Make sure all surfaces are 2-sided (Texture option)
3 Render a normal pass, save
4 Change Y the size of the Null -1 (asuming the location off the null is also your relction surface)
5 Render flipped Reflection pass, save
6 Backup your model
7 Change all the surfaces in the scene to a gradient that goes from white at the reflection base to black where you want no relfection to be visible, also, make sure all surface have 100 Luminance, 0 Diffuse, 0 Specular, etc, and no Shaders active.
8 Render this reflection distance pass,save.
9 Start Masking all objects with the Matte Object option (found under Properties, Render Tab), use black. Set the Matte Color of the reflecting surface to white.
10 Render this reflection surface matte, save.

11 Fire up a composite package and add the four images.
Use the reflection distance image as a matte on the flipped reflection image.
Use the reflection matte as a matte for the above so it can be composited on your original normal render.
Now play with transparancy on the reflection part to adjust the reflection surface.

Whenever you need a different reflection distance you only need to render the reflection distance pass again...

[wizlon]

Thanks guys, I thought using multiple weight maps would give more control, but you're right it wasn't nessecery, In the end I used Elmers technique, but with distance to object (null) instead of camera. here's a quick test lws if anyone's interested.

Thanks again.

[wizlon]

Elmar not Elmer. Sorry.

[HowardM]

very cool Red! Now is this possible mixing Elmars technique or doing it straight up in LW? hmmm this could be an 8 request?

Reflected Distance to Y?

:)

..i wonder if someone could write an LSCRIPT that could do this on the fly in LW!?