One-Way Mirrors

One-Way Mirrors

Does anybody know how you could render a One-Way Mirror?!

I tried using a flattened Box as the mirror with one side as completely transparent, and the opposing side as completely reflective. When rendering though, I want to be able to see through the box like a one-way mirror and have the reflective side remain reflective.

In other words, is there a way to make the reflective side invisible when rendering but still allow it to have the reflective quality?

Thanks
 
One way mirror

I am not sure that I understand the question.
Are you after something like the attached scene, where the green box in front is mirrored just a bit whilst the red ball behind the ow-mirror is visible?
If so, I simply used a plane with a reflective glass material and tweaked the transparency.
 

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  • OWMirror.jpg
    OWMirror.jpg
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That is close to what I am going for, but I want to have full reflection on the mirror side and full transparency on the glass side.

What I am trying to replicate is what you would experience when you are in the middle of two mirrors. Looking at one mirror, you would see infinite reflections back and forth, and an infinite number of images of yourself getting smaller and smaller in each reflection. See attached picture.

For this, you would position the camera as follows (in 2D):

(Mirror) (Camera) --> (Mirror)

The reason I am trying to have it be a one-way mirror is I want to position the camera outside of the reflections for example:

(Camera) --> (Mirror) (Mirror)

Does that make sense?
 

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  • infinite mirror.jpg
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OW Mirror

The good news: I know now what you want to achieve :smile:
The bad news: I can´t think of a trick to achive that :frown:

Greetings from Vienna
Helmut
 
Good news never seem to help the situation :)

I know that you can deselect "visible in renderer" and have the effect of making the mirror side not visible in the render, but doing so takes away the effect of the reflection. Is there a setting I could select where the mirror side would still have its reflective qualities while the actual material is invisible in the renderer?
 
I am kind of lost as to what you want to do. The camera wont show up in any reflections anyway. I placed two planes in the scene with a highly reflective material on them. Then it was just a case of placing my camera and rendering.

I have no idea where reflection depth is within Cheetah to have more reflections going on so that's why it shows black at the end. Looking.

Ok for ray depth select render from the menu at the top of the screen then render preferences. Maximum seems to be 24 though.

???

Mike
 

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  • MirrorMirror.png
    MirrorMirror.png
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Last edited:
Hi Steve,

I hope this is what you're after...

If you only want the reflection in a material to show up and film trough this, you can turn the opacity of the diffuse color (of he first mirror) to zero (alpha unchecked) and the reflection to maximum (white). Attach a render tag to the first mirror and only check "visible in reflections"...(see attached file)

Kind regards,
Filip
 

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  • onewaymirrror.zip
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I think it is! I have to admit, I'm still fairly new at Cheetah and have never used the render tag before. I need to learn more about all tags, they seem to have lots of benefits. Thanks again.
 
Hi Filip,

What you gave me was close...after a few reflections, the plane becomes black. Do you know of any reason why that happens or a way to fix it so the reflections go on and on indefinitely?
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2012-04-25 at 9.52.50 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2012-04-25 at 9.52.50 PM.png
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