Mirror Testing

For one of the shots in The Big Top we want to have an over the shoulder shot of the main character looking at himself in the mirror. ordinarily this wouldn't be a particularly hard shot to get but because the film is mixed media with real stop motion sets, including the mirror, and CG characters it could be bit of a challenge getting the two to match up together.

After a longtime messing around in Maya trying to render the reflections without the mirror itself and trying to get alphas rendered with the characters reflection in, George Quelch and I finally decided to put a CG green screen behind the character so that that would be behind him in the reflection and then we could key that out in Nuke. Although this did work, there must be a much easier way of doing it because this also had problems like there was some green glow on the characters shoulder that we are looking over. We thought about maybe having two identical CG characters mirroring each other or rendering one from both angles and compositing them together. We will be doing more research and testing on this.