Blendermania Tutorial

Rippled and Mirrored Surfaces
by Vincent Stoessel

This is a tutorial for creating a rippled mirrored
surface in version 1.62 and above in Blender.
You should already be familiar with the basic tasks of
creating various objects and applying materials and textures.
The technique makes use of the new animation effect
called "wave" and another new feature called "Enviroment
mapping". Take a look at the example below.
The "water" has a wave applied to it and an
enviroment map that gives the illusion of reflection.

Create a plane. Hit the space bar to get the main menu.
Dd Add->Mesh->plane. Add 2 lamps as well for lighting
and contrast. Add a sky (worldbuttons)
to the scene so that we can have nice something to
"reflect". OK After you've placed your objects your scene
should look something like this.

You may want to do a quick test render

The first thing that you want to do is select the plane and
go to the material window. If no materials are assigned to the
plane create a "new" one. You can play around with the
color. Make sure Csp and Cmir are selected. Cmir is used to
give a color to the reflecting surface. Use my settings
below if you want. Next go the Texture buttons.

In the texture window you will see the different kinds of
textures that you can apply (link) to the current material.
Select envmap. You will a bunch of envmap related buttons
appear. Basically the way the enviroment map works is
Blender creates an imaginary cube that acts like a six-way
camera, it takes a picture of the x,-x,y,-y,z,-z axis.
Aren't you glad tht you paid attention in Geometry class?
These images are then molded together to form 1 "picture"
that you can apply to a material. Another way to think about
it is imagining that you are standing in front of a full view
mirror. You see yourself right? Now imagine someone has taken
a full size photograph of you and pasted it on the
mirrrored glass. Depending on the the resolution of the
photograph, it can be pretty good imitation of reality.
The is a envmp called cuberes, that adjusts the resolution
of the "cube camera."

Now any object in your scene can be the cube camera,
all you do is type the object name into the Obj: button.
For this tutorial we will create an "Empty" object to
give us the position of the cube camera. The empty object is
kind of like a 3D placeholder in Blender. So type the
word "Empty" into the Ob: button. Place the empty object
under the camera and the line of the plane. Imagine that
the empty is a reflection of the camera in the side view
num_button 1 on the key pad. You will probably be doing
a lot of repositioning of the empty object and test renders.
This will definitely take hands on practice before you master
the art.

When you do your renders, you should see 6 images
flash across your screen , this comes from the cube camera.
The next image should be the final rendered image.
If you move things around in the scene, go back to
the plane's texture window and hit the free data
button to make the cube camera build a new enviroment map.
Is the plane reflecting the enviroment like my
test render below?

OK let's add some objects to make it more interesting
and do another render.

OK, almost done. Now to add a rippled appearance to the
plane, you have to select it again and subdivide it as
much as blender will allow you.

With the plane still selected, get out of edit mode and go
the effects section of the anim window. Hit the new effect button
and select the wave option. You will have to do a lot of tweaking
the values here in order to get the wave you really want.
I put the settings that I used below. Also you will want to
increment to the last frame (250 by default) in order to
see the effect. This is because all the effects are linked
to animation over time, so you won't see the full effect
utill time has passed.

When you get the wave effect that you like, go ahead
and render some tests. It may take a few renders to get
what you want. This is true in any 3d program.

Okay, hopefully you get a result like I did.
Keep tweaking and doing those late-night test renders.
It is worth the effort. Ciao

Rippled and Mirrored Surfaces by Vincent Stoessel

Rippled and Mirrored Surfaces
by Vincent Stoessel