Rigged Mirrors and Lenses

Description:

I was always making little doo-dads to get more views on my focal points with a single render, or to create interesting distortions; I like being able to tune this with a rendered preview instead of having to do it in compositing or post. So I made a file that contains these sort of things that I like to use. As much as possible is done with unwritten modifiers and editable curves to make it easier to customize and animate.

Mirrors are rigged such that the reflection of the reflection of a target object is always visible, no matter how you move the camera or target, good for giving a rear view. Lens is basically parented to the camera. Consider replacing the camera with a lamp to use the lens or mirrors to create lighting effects. It shouldn't take much thought to figure out how to string additional mirrors together if you want, but I think more than 2 is overkill.

Mirrors and lenses are also rigged to be curvable. Move or scale their bones. You can edit the shape of the curve by editing the custom curve on the vertex weight edit modifier-- think of the curve as a cross-section.

Mirrors have a material with a custom-designed chromatic aberration / pearlescent effect, which I thought I'd just throw on there; I figure if you just want a straight mirror, that's easy enough. Lens has some diffusion which you can edit in its material via the RGB curve.

Just made as a personal tool, but I hope somebody else finds it useful as well.

HDRI is CC0 from HDRI haven. Teapot is the famous, public domain Utah teapot.