Reflections - an easier way?

[Gideon Yuval]

Hi Y'all,
I'm making a couple of bathroom units of Birch ply with Wenge veneer. In both bathrooms there will be sizable mirrors.
Seeing as SU doesn't do reflections I decided to try to create the illusion of reflections.
What do think?

[Michael Ballent]

That looks pretty good... Some day I will be able to do things like that

[Dave Richards]

Michael, you could do that now. Gideon makes it look hard becuase he did such a great job of it. I'll let him show the secret if he wants to give it away in his model.

[Jim Becker]

Oh, my...that's very kewel Gideon! I can't even imagine how to pull that one off!

[Jamie Buxton]

Lemme guess...

You've collected the woman, the bathtub, the counter, etc as a component. Then you copied that component, did the Flip Along trick, and placed that flipped component behind the mirror. The mirror itself is what SU calls a "transparent color" from the paint palette.

[Jim Becker]

Jamie, I want to see what happens when you orbit that sucker...

[Jamie Buxton]

Jamie, I want to see what happens when you orbit that sucker...

Jim, it's not Orbit, but Flip Along. Orbit rotates the object. Flip Along actually does mirror images. Flip Along is not the most obvious of tools in the SU package. You can only flip components or groups. You first declare something a component or group. Then you select it, and pull down the Edit menu to Group, where a sub menu offers Flip Along. This long collection of moves allows you to construct objects which are symmetrical.

[Dave Richards]

Jamie's got it. It's a useful trick when you want to show the back of something in the same view. I did this for someone who has a WoodRat and wanted to know how to mount a piece of a sliding DT. Sorry about the low quality screen grab.

[Jim Becker]

My comment about the orbit was not about creating the effect...it was about how the reflection would react with viewing angle... It would be way kewel if the photons cooperated like in real life, but I suspect that cannot hold true in this case.

[Dave Richards]

Jim, you are correct although it works pretty well as long as you don't orbit the view to where you can see the copy behind the "mirror". The worst part is if you turn on shadows. They are in the wrong place in the reflection.

[Gideon Yuval]

Hi Y'all,
Sorry I didn't jump in sooner, I was away (and away from my computer).
Michael, Dave is right. Anybody can make that kind of model. It's not a complicated model, it just take some patience to make but really, there's nothing fancy about it. As you get more practice and you begin to model more quickly, you'll find that your models become more complex and 'impressive' simply because you're not wearing yourself out while modeling.
The reflection is indeed simply a flipped copy of the components seen through translucent glass. It behaves beautifully when orbiting.
My question remains: does any-one have any ideas as to how it can be done more easily?