Difficult for me to answer as I do not work for RL.  Yes I have some contact with their developers but the reality is even if I asked such a question and they gave me an answer either positive or negative they might not want it made public.  The danger is that people then have an expectation that something might happen.  As I mentioned earlier in this topic like a lot of software they have both legacy code and new code and there may be some restrictions on what they can do.  But I am not a programmer by any means so even I would be speculating on why something like this cannot be implemented.

Also keep in mind that dev teams are only so big and they have bosses  that decide what is a priority, so even if something is A). a good idea and B). possible to do, does not mean it may actually happen.

Such is the wonders of commercial software development.



Alan M

Cheers Alan, I just meant is there a known technical reason for it, like a restriction in DX9 and DX11 rendering technology, something like that.
If not, and mirrors turn out to still be a problem, then giving us that control would solve a lot.

The reflection tech that the water plain uses is somewhat limited, I believe. Currently it can only reflect on flat, horizontal. You can rotate the plain if you turn off the gizmo and select the rotate tool, but it will still only reflect flat, horizontal.

They've been working on the new engine, and all their products, probably since iC6 went to DX11. So, more pressing issues. We get soft specular reflections with the GI in realtime. VXGI computes its lighting and specular on a voxelized version of the scene for greater efficiency, but at the cost of being super sharp. So we might need to keep playing tricks a little longer.

At the cost of being super sharp? ... but isn't that what we want for a mirror?

BTW, that stuff on the first page about PBR materials not being released for iClone6 yet, being in beta.
Is that a mistake or did I miss an announcement somewhere?

Reason I ask is because if they're planning to release PBR materials in iClone6, that would definitely ease the pain while I can get a new graphics card sorted

iClone 6 has support for "Substances" but not PBR.

That means you can have Substances where you do cool things like move sliders to "age" a prop, adjusting the amount of rust or crinkles and stuff like that, but the textures use the diffuse/glossy renderer that iClone has had for a long time.  In iClone 7 we will be able to use a much better looking PBR engine for the rendering.

I hope that helps.

---

iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Cheers Dennis, I'm understanding the Substance thing but I meant the part quoted here, sounds as if PBR materials are coming to iClone6, it's the part that says "yet"

Great tutorial Alan. I think it also provides a good introduction for using object linking for achieving difficult animations like the one below done by stuckon3d back in 2011 .
There is a lot to do in the process of achieving this and hopefully iClone 7 will have decent mirrors that removes the need for this kind of work.
But if it doesn't and if the api for iclone7 will do the kind of things that I am hoping for, then this long set of procedures could be put together into a script to make it much simpler.
So, this is good stuff to become familiar with. I will be using your tutorial to help me finish something I am working on that needs 3 or 4 mirrors along a wall.
Or maybe I will go with curved surfaces behind holes in the wall which was my original plan for these mirrors. But your way looks like better mirrors.





i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Thanks for sharing. I was wondering how this was done exactly.

Hi pumeco.  PBR materials will not be in iClone 6 they are destined for iClone 7 as per previous statements on this forum as well as the teaser videos released by RL.  Here is the most recent one showing the wonders of PBR along with a lot of other stuff.



So we will have to await iClone 7 next year for access to PBR materials.

Alan M

[quote]Delerna (11/30/2016)

---

Great tutorial Alan. I think it also provides a good introduction for using object linking for achieving difficult animations like the one below done by stuckon3d back in 2011 .

Thanks for your kind comments Delema.  I too am so looking forward not only to the API but also Python, I am so hoping that the Phython implementation is deep enough to do some serious stuff because you are spot on, writing scripts to create rigs like these would be a breeze.

Alan M