Preserved Topic: Reflection reflections

I'm playing around at making glass balls (see?) and I'm experimenting with virually every technique I know (now watch me throw a bright, spikey glow in there).

now.. I want a reflection that says "look how shiney this is!", and I wanted to take a picture from my monitor outward to capture what natural reflections are in the room behind me- but it seems the best way to do this would be to get a digital camera (which I don't have)..

..Instead, it occurs to me that someone out there must have a similar picture of a reflection of, say, an office..

Here Doc has a reflection of himself - and here is Blue Sky Heart's rendition- notice the reflection in the glass...

Anybody have a nice reflection pic or know where to get one?


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I'm.....confused.

Do you want a picture of an object reflected in something, or do you want a picture to *use* in your reflection?

In other words, are you looking for a reference image to study, or an image to use?

It seems that what you want is to be able to use a photo as your reflection, and are unsure how to go about it. If that's the case, the best way that I've found is to simply use the Displace Filter on the photo and mask it over the object, playing with the transparency/blending mode. Almost any photo will do in this case...

Is that what you're after?

Nah DL i think what he wants is a picture of an office that he can use as the reflection in the glass ball, so it would possibly make the ;person viewing the image think that they were the reflection in the ball, make sense
????

Well, the only reason I don't think that's the case is -

"must have a similar picture of a reflection of, say, an office.."

So it sounds like he's after an already reflected image of an office...which confuses me. If the idea is to use the already reflected image as the reflection, then the method outlined above will be a much better way.

If it's just a picture of an office that is needed, I'm sure petskull knows enough to go to google already =)

quote:

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now.. I want a reflection that says "look how shiney this is!"

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:-)



[This message has been edited by docilebob (edited 01-07-2003).]

DL is right on the ball here.

If you?re making something like a glass ball you have several things to consider. The most important being its environment. You could have a glass bead sitting on a brush metal background reflecting a office but honestly, that would be just umm, wrong.

If you?re after something generic to use as a reflection then well, you'll be hard pressed finding a generic all environment encompassing image. The world is a vast and varied place; there's isn?t much that I'd call generic about it. This is primarily what makes creating images of shiny things hard, doubly so if you don't have a pre set environment to build it in. This is also why the Mac Aqua style shine works so well. It's not dependant on any particular environment and it acts as if it existed in a bland white box with a single pure white light source. Which works fine because seeing a reflection of a beach or an office while looking into the buttons on the apple site would just look plain wrong.

A real world environment will have lots of light sources; windows, light bulbs and reflective surfaces... They'll all affect the way a glass object looks in terms of not only reflections but refractions and how the object takes its physical form. Being made of glass and all getting the light sources right are key to describing how it looks.

So, if your going to be using any image as a reflection for an object like this then you'll need to consider the light sources in such an environment. Where is the light coming from?... How bright is it?... etc ect...

This all effects how your glass ball/bead will look, where the seculars and reflections will be, where are the bright spots from the refractions and all that.

Like I said before, there really isn't any way of creating a "generic" real world environment for such an object unless you do something simplistic like Mac Aqua. Another way to do this would be to try and find something that symbolises a reflection... It won't look realistic but it'll convey the feeling well enough. Ever wondered why the blue/white/yellow gradient is used so much in those cheesy metallic type tutorials? Car adds -- All of those car adds that have shown cars in the desert reflected a blue sky with a sparse yellow/brown landscape and well, if you slap the same thing on some text we are reminded of those reflections and think "ooh... shiny".

Other things you could try would be to use a dark room lit by a window or two for the light source. Or maybe just a black image with a couple of bright blurry spots on it.

I tried the generic window shape when making this a while back:


Not overly realistic but eh, it didn't work too badly. Anyways, once you figure out which environment the object will be in then it should be easier. Oh, take a look at this too:
Old Flux webby

That's a site a did a couple of years back, the reflections on the TV screen were the last bit of the interface I worked on and it was simply a matter of reflecting the lightsources that were used throughout the rest of the interface. Environment first, reflection second. Trust me, it's easier that way.

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 01-07-2003).]

Make another one of those and enter it in the January sig contest!

yep - i think jamie has the technique down, and petskull, i think you're slightly off.

taking a pic of a 'reflection' won't work because you'll end up with too much information concerning the reflecting surface.
for instance, i can take a cool pic of my face in the monitor, but you'll end up with more details about the monitor screen.

for a nice reflection, go check out steves displacement tutorial. it has to be said.

quote:

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go check out steves displacement tutorial. it has to be said

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Hehe, it was! In my post (just not in so many words )

docilebob just kills me ....



Petskull: you can feel free to swipe the sorta junky "office" shot in the curves tutorial to experiment with if it's any help.

Not to get terribly off-topic, but speaking of Steve's tutorial, in particalur the page pointed out by the man himself, came across this a few days ago compliments of an other-boardly acquaintence:
PP7_Ch02_ByTheNumbers.pdf

Getting a red X there WJ.

<edit> Nope, WJ, getting the same X that way too. May be an Acrobat problem</edit>

[This message has been edited by docilebob (edited 01-09-2003).]

Hmmm...

Try going to Articles by Dan Margulis and clicking on "Chapter 2 - By the Numbers".

It's basically the same thing as Steve's office picture, but more indepth on several fronts.


[This message has been edited by warjournal (edited 01-08-2003).]

So, I'm just really curious what the verdict was here....what was it you wanted to do petskull - and were you able to?