Reflecting rear of image plates

[tomwyn]

Hi all,

I've been trying to figure out the best way to set up a shoot concept I have - And after spending the obligatory day or two on scouring the net to no avail, I thought I'd reach out on here as there's a lot of clever people

Basically, I'm looking to combine live action footage with Houdini elements and I'm looking for advice on the best or correct way to go about constructing my shots/workflow.

The live shoot will consist of both static & crane shots of various objects/people in front of a gradient background, and my Houdini elements will be a series of reflective surfaces placed around these objects in 3D space.

I'm perfectly capable of tracking the footage & capturing the lighting environment on-set etc. But my question at the moment would be: What would be the best way to reflect the backs of these objects in my 3D scene? i.e. if a reflective surface passes behind my object while falling/rotating.

I'm able to capture stills from the back of the shoot setup, but my main issue is that some of the objects are quite complex structurally.

If the objects were quite simple geometrically I had considered rebuilding them in 3D & then possibly camera mapping textures onto them from the captured stills.

Obviously I could set up the stills as a reflection map, but that won't give me the level of detail I'm looking for, as it only provides a single angle view of the object's rear.

I'm not particularly experienced with combining live/3D so was wondering if there was possibly a well known or established technique for achieving this that I wasn't aware of? (without having to create life-accurate & massively detailed models)

Hopefully my description is sufficiently detailed & I'd greatly appreciate any feedback or pointers in the right direction... If anyone needs me to clarify anything please feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance!

T.

P.S. Apologies if this post is in the wrong sub-section of the forum, I suppose it could come under modeling/comping/effects or even modeling, so I thought general would be the best place. Feel free to move if necessary.

EDIT:

It struck me that the description might have been a little unclear - for the scenes imaging a vase on a podium with pieces of mirrored glass falling all around it.

Edited February 18, 2013 by tomwyn

[tomwyn]

Am still trying to figure out the best workflow/pipeline for reflecting the rears of my objects without taking a gazillion photos, and without doing it all in post.

Any tips, or insights into other people's methods on shoots really would be appreciated.

thanks.