Hi@all I have another little problem with my small guy: I use real-video map as szene. In one of the maps is a mirror. How could i do it, having the small little guy appearing in the real mirror of the realvideo by rendering somthing like a mirror picture by a mirror picture catcher? Any ideas? Thank you very much

Let me get this straight first... Video file used as T-map on object. Area of video that you want to be reflective. Reflection should be of objects in the scene. If this is the case, than I would try to make an alpha channel of the reflective surface in the movie file. (You know black and white and shades of gray, Black=On, White=Off -- Or otherway around) Anyway, save this as a movie file. Use it in the reflectiveness map in the appropriate setting in the texture panel. You may have to fade in the reflection map and then fade it out so that it relfects only at the desired time. Now, making the alpha can be tricky, especially if your clip is long. If you are have after effects, I'd use that. But you could probably accomplish it in flash if you wanted. Or frame by frame in photoshop. ; ) At anyrate, that's how I would attempt solving the problem. Good luck. -pix

thank you very much for your advice. my problem is as following: i am not the guy who is coping the two movies together. i just have to make the movies for the animation. so i am in the position to make two movies, one for the alpha, one for the play. that is too much. (capacities) So my question went the way, how to do it, without rendering the file twice... i will try your advice, but i think, it will take too much time... thank you and until soon benjamino

There are a handful of ways around this but I think you're going to have to do some work before you're happy with it. Try what pix said but let us know if it isn't working. -Kix

all rihght...

hmmmm. now i have no clue what you're trying to do. at first it sounded like you were trying to get your background to reflect elements in your 3D scene. Now it sounds like you are preparing an animated background for compositing. at anyrate, you're right that these things take lots of time. Rendering multiple times for different passes is normal procedure. Just remember that you can optomize the rendering process by turning off channels that you don't need. Rendering out an alpha channel of a reflective object should take only a fraction of the time it takes to actually ray trace the scene. In fact, you don't even have to have reflections on in the renderer to do it. Make the reflective object whitw with 100% glow, and all other objects black with no glow. Make sure there are no other shader values. Then turn off or kill all your light sources. Ambient too. You should be able to render this in the Z-buffer mode - just make sure you have use actual lighting checked in the options. - and you'll get a white mask of your reflective object on the black background. And it will render just about at real time. It's worth a try. -pix