Hi I am wondering if it is possible to have an objects reflection fade in a mirror but still be visible to the camera. Basically having someone slowly become a vampire and they see their reflection slowy fade in the mirror.

I know how to do the invisible in mirror by turning off object in raytracing, but is it possible to do this without having to do multiple frames?  Or is it a case of rendering the first frame as normal and last frame after the change as normal and then use the transperancy section in the material room and fade them out that way.

Any help would be greatly apprieciated thank you. :)

the point is of course to fade the character, not the reflectivity of the mirror: when the char fades in the mirror it reflects more of the environment.

personally I'm a "never do in 3D what can be done in 2D" person, so my initial idea would be to render twice; visible to raytracing ON and OFF, and merge them at will by overlaying both layers in the video editor. This way I can alter the fading speed / moments without any re-rendering and almost interactively. I can even make the character and its clothes fade at different rates (3 re-renders), and so on.

Any Poser scheme seems quite elaborate to me, require a lot of testing / re-rendering, etcetera. We'll see if anyone comes up with something.

Thatnk you yeah I might have to go the 2d route with my renders.  Benice if they had a way to adjust via a dial that turn off in raytracing setting. :)

It would be fairly simple if there was a way to animate material settings (like transparency), but I don't know how to do that. If anyone knows how, please post it. It could be very useful.

Next to the value of the transparency channel (on the left), there is a button. You can set it to be animated there (just like with a number of other channels)

To get back to the original problem: Make a duplicate of the figure. Set one to be invisible in raytracing and the other invisible in camera, then attach transparency to all the channels of the second figure and animate those (you might have to animate the specular channel as well)

Thanks wimvdb, that is great information. I think I'll go play with it.

@wimvdb: yeah that was the one. Depends on the poser version (you need P9/Pro2012). Re-rendering when playing with the fading speed might not be an issue, but might when it's large size / high quality and you're interactively discussing things  with a client or so.

@wimvdb thank you for the info will try that see what it happens. :)