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Inspiring
July 9, 2024
Question

Moving person reflection on the floor

  • July 9, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 1005 views

Hi, I have this video and I want to make the woman´s reflection on the floor. Searching on the web, I just found simple reflections. In my case, the perspective is a chalange. How to make a reflection in this case? If you have some tutorial specific about this, please, send me.

Thanks in advance.

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3 replies

Mylenium
Legend
July 10, 2024

You would have to slice her up to isolate the individual legs and body and then flip them around separately, pinning the reflection to her real feet and then piece everything back together. If you only want a partial soft reflection with heavy blur this could work realtively well and quick, but otherwise this is going to be a ton of extra work.

 

Mylenium

Inspiring
July 10, 2024

Thank you Rick and Mylenium.

Well, pretty hard for me... I already have a camera tracked and a plane at the floor level. Is it possible to setup a material for that plane to behave like a "mirror", so the reflections would be shown naturally? Sorry about a question like this. I´m a 3D artist, so, as After has a 3D layer, I have to ask about that.

Community Expert
July 10, 2024

It's not going to be easy. You need to track the camera movement and add a 3-D layer that matches the floor set to catch shadows only. Then you need a 3D copy of the footage layer with the actor only (keyed) set to cast shadows only and light transmission set to 100%. Then, you need a parallel light pointing at the spot where the actor's feet touch the floor, a feathered mask to fade out the cast reflection, and then you will probably need a bunch of keyframes to simulate the reflection. 

 

The 3D layer in the same plane as the floor will catch the actor's reflection just as it would in real life, but figuring out the angles and getting a good enough camera track is going to be tough. Perspective is controlled by camera position, and it does not look like the floor matches the perspective of the studio shot of the actor. If you don't have enough fixed geometry in the original footage of the actor walking through the scene to get a good camera track, you'll need Mocha Pro, Syntheyes, or some other software to try and track the camera and set up a matching virtual floor to catch the reflection (shadows only with 100% light transmission). That kind of realism in a greenscreen shot requires a lot of careful planning when you create the original footage so things will match up. 

Community Expert
July 9, 2024

Kind of a big project. Duplicate the layer, roto brush her out, flip the rotbrish horizontal and vertical. Reduce opacity on the rotobrushed layer. Also add a blur to the rotobrushed layer. There may be other approaches provided by other users.

Inspiring
July 9, 2024

@RobShultz Thank you for replying. No need to use rotobrush because the girl is already masked. I duplicated her and flip it on vertical, but I got two issues:

1 - the feet doesn´t touch each other because of perspective.

2 - When I play the video, the animation of the "reflection" doesn´t match the "real" one.

So, I need to know the correct workflow for this kind of job.