About reflections and reflective surfaces

[Hauteclaire]

Good afternoon fellow artists! Lately I've been observing and trying understand how reflections work (Pic related).

I know that the reflections are super off and I’ve been trying all day to come up with a way to make it look right , but I can’t get anything more from observation than the things I already aplied and I can only get so far knowing that light reflects at the oposite angle in which it inside.

Do anyone here knows any good books, resources or tutorials that cover the subject, that I might be missing? I would greatly apreciate any kind of help.

Thanks and have a great day!

[arenhaus]

You can build reflections much the same way you build any perspective. Norling has some examples in his book concerning reflections in water; with a little work you can apply the same methods to any reflecting plane.

Alternately, if your reflective surface is planar, you can think of it as a mirror copy of your scene as seen through a portal. Same perspective applies to all reflected objects and to the actual objects.

Your first picture (reflective sphere) more or less works, even though you did not make nearly enough distortion around the edges. The second one fails simply because you drew reflections in the pyramid as if its right side were a vertical mirror, and the left side is weirdly displaced. You need to recalculate the position of the reflected objects in relation to the actual planes of the pyramid's sides.

[Hauteclaire]

Oh, I see, thanks for the insight! But is there any way to calculate where's the vp in the mirror and how to proyect the image? Sorry if it seems a bit silly but this topic seems to be a bit difficult and I can't certainly find out. Thanks and sorry for the trouble!

[Elwell]

http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/pers...ml#reflections