Hi folks,
I’m really new to compositing, and I’m attempting to find a solution to faking refraction with a camera-space normal pass from Mental Ray.
Right now, I’ve got a workable solution through After Effects CS3 using the Normality plugin. It looks surprisingly good, although I reckon it’ll need to be done at a higher resolution and then scaled down. But I think I need a few more options on this. I’m assuming that we’ll be using some sort of node-based compositing system in the end.
I’ve opened Toxik a grand total of twice now, and I was hoping someone could point me in the direction I need to fake refractions in it. It’s a bit bewildering to navigate. ^_^; I’m thinking that I plug something into the Refraction map in a Reactor composition, but every video I’ve seen online is of some version of Toxik that’s a lot older and tools / workflows don’t exactly map. What do these maps look like, and does anyone have any good links to workflow?
Or am I barking up the wrong tree, Toxik-wise? I’m looking into it because on subscription everyone gets a copy, and we’re a Maya shop. Oh, and it has to be a normals pass, I wager, and not depth pass-generated refraction because of the shallowness of what’s being refracted. (I had a look at ZBornToy and while it’d be good for a number of other effects, I have a feeling solutions like that won’t work for my situation.)
I’m sure this is really elementary stuff, but honestly I’m not even sure I’m googling the right keywords. Thanks in advance!