I had a request for help from test17 about whether or not it is possible to make a mirror object in iClone 6.  As we all know the mirror object that was in iClone 5 is not available in iClone 6 so you have to trick the effect.  There are various ways I have seen including as pointed out by the author the fun of using a water surface and rotating your entire world to make it look like it is on a wall.  I have just posted an example of my own take on a solution to my YouTube channel.  If anyone feels they would like to know how this is done then I will do a how-to video.  



Just let me know here in this topic.

All the best

Alan M

Yes please to the tutorial video.
Thank you

Homebuilt computer - Windoze 10, INTEL i9 9900 k @ 5.1 GHz, EVGA RTX 2080 TI XC ULTRA, 16GB 3100 MHz RAM, Asus  Maximus Hero XI motherboard, Sound blaster Z series. iClone6 & 7 Pipeline, Crazytalk 8, Crazytalk Animator 2, Facefilter, Pop video 3, Hitfilm 4Pro, Cubase 8.5 Pro,

You can do it!

The water surface trick has already been done by someone else which you can get in the market place if you wish, it also opens up a whole can or worms as some things in iClone stop working correctly when you rotate your environment.  My method is fairly obvious and somewhat different and works for me.

...ask him to show you how to do it using PBR.
(adding white pixels to smoothness)

PBR support in the iClone 6 material editor is not released yet and this in not the beta forum so I am afraid it will not be a PBR solution, sorry.  

I will make the video for you all and post it and you can make what you will of it.  It is as I say a cheat because the real reflection parameter in iClone 6 just does not work well with flat surfaces as we all know you get an over sized pixelated mush.

I will let you know when the video is ready by posting here.



Alan M

Hi one and all,
Sorry it took so long but I had to wait until the weekend outside of normal work hours to make the time to do this.

Anyhow, here it is, hope it is of some use.



All the best for now

Alan M

I applaud your efforts, but man, that's a painful way to get a reflection in a mirror, unless it is a big part of the story, nope, not gonna do it. I really hope iC7 resolves this issue. 

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

I appreciate your point of view but as I said, it's cheat.  And someone asked me how to do a mirror effect as they actually needed a solution right now.  If you are happy to wait for iC7, iC8 etc then fine but as we know from this forum iC7 will not even be available until 2017 and even then there may not be a real mirror solution.  Also using a water surface and rotating everything in your universe is even more painful so take your pick.

It is there for those that feel the need and by the way this is a VFX technique used in live action where a mirror cannot be used in the real world and you need to create a reflection.

All the best 

Alan M

Thanks for posting this Alan! I guess once the rig is set up it will be easier.

My own solution has been to render the actual mirror effect required by running iClone under DX9 (in which case IC5 mirrors do work), and then using as masking technique to keep just the mirrored image, which is then blended with the iClone 6 render under DX 11. This is also quite involved, obviously.

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In Muvizu you can use a camera's real-time output as a texture for a plane and make a crude 'mirror', if iClone could project a camera onto a texture, with this method of rigging the camera, you could have the effect in real time. If Muvizu can pull this off, I would think it would be possible with iC7.

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

As you will be aware RL have removed features from iClone before, this maybe down to changes in the graphics API or just because they felt it was an unnecessary feature.  A good example of this is shadow casting on a background image or photograph.  I used to use this all the time for pre-viz as I could take location photographs and just drop iClone charters in and have their shadows on the ground.  Now that is not possible in iC7.  Real-time camera projection would indeed be wonderful as it would solve this issue too.  The reality is that the iClone 6 developers have their own agenda and I happen to know from working with them during the creation of the Fundamentals series that there is a lot of legacy code in iC6.  This is why to date we have not seen a full animation curves editor and also why my most requested feature, 'A button to turn off Auto Animate' could not be implemented.  So sadly just because another program can do something does not mean that iClone can do so easily too.

I am very much hoping that iC7 brings a lot of new stuff to the table, they have stated it will include the fore mentioned curves editor.  If you watch the Work In Progress video that was posted the other day you will see the new camera in the side pane of one section of the video complete with full film back controls and the other good news is it will have a Python API.

Alan M

Yes at the moment there is no simple easy push button solution to this.  Maybe PBR rendering will bring a solution we shall have to see there is a lot of nice stuff listed in the iC7 teaser video and page.  As to the rig it is common practise to set-up and re-use rigs in all of the major DCC apps so once you find a way of doing something you can just load it up again and work with it.  iClone does make even this difficult because to date you cannot merge iClone projects so you would have to keep this rig in a clean project all of its own and then build your scene into it.  This has always been an issue with iClone for me.

Alan M