How to Create an Infinite Mirror Room

David Ariew : Hey, everybody, what's up. You may not know me, but my name is David Ariew and hopefully you'll be seeing a lot more of me in the near future for school of motion. So today we're going to be creating an infinity mirror room, look using cinema 4d and octane render. Now, what I mean by that is just taking an object and putting it inside a fully reflective box. There's a little more to it than that, but depending on the geometry of that box, you get some very intricate and crazy looks that you could use for concert visuals or your suite, Instagram renders, whatever you want. Anyway, let's check it out.
David Ariew : Okay. So I'm sure a lot of you have seen photos like this before, but there are these things out there called infinity mirror boxes, basically just a box of mirrors. It's like the simplest thing ever, but they're really cool for our museum installations and for getting these really pretty hallway looks of infinite lights and they just kind of look magical and other worldly, but just by the nature of having every surface in the room, being a mirror reflection, you get this extreme depth and feel that you're in this massive sea of the lights or whatever is inside the box. Now, recently I was asked to recreate this look for a client, and this is what I came up with. This one's actually flying through the center of a chandelier. So we get that added element of objects, passing close to the lens, and we get that interesting depth and motion blur. And this is actually one of the more simple boxes that I made, but it doesn't really take much geometry at all to really sell this look. Now this is actually the same shot, but with a fish eye lens, and we're going to get into the universal camera and how to tweak that out, to get these really insane trippy looking visuals
David Ariew : And again, this is that same scene, but we're just doing a camera orbit and you can see the mirror box geometry kind of cutting in and including the chandelier at certain points, which I think is kind of a cool added detail. And I also animated back to a much wider focal length here. So we're seeing this almost fractal triangular pattern emerging, And then I just had the cameras zoom back in so that we could get a perfect loop here.
David Ariew : Next. I tried something that wasn't a chandelier and took an animation from a couple of years before borrowed it from a dead mouse project file and copied it in here. It's just some really simple animating lines. There's nothing crazy going on. I'm just animating the scale of these guys, but just want to see if I could get more of a scifi and tech look out of this. I like the perspective here, almost looking down this tunnel is kind of cool. Now here's where things started to get a little bit more wacky and I'll break this down more when we get to it, but essentially I'm just animating the focal length of the new fish islands in the universal camera system, all the way out to its extreme, where we get this super distorted look almost like a shot from a 360 camera and for the techie lines here, I used Filson's plugin, TOPA, former as well as other plugin Reese blind to just grab the splines from the geometry.
David Ariew : And the only other thing to know here is that I do have motion blur on so that when it gets out to this wide focal length, it's not quite as harsh. We see a little bit of these objects that are passing quickly by the lens, streaking out a bit, and I've animated the aperture so that we get these out of focus, bokeh that past close to the lens. And here's a separate still from that last shot that I just thought looked cool on its own. And here I want to give a shout out to my buddy, Tom, who goes by [inaudible] on Instagram. He got all excited and inspired by the renders that I was posting. So he decided to go and start making his own. And he sent me what he was making. And he started using these buckyballs, which are basically these spheres formed by hexagons as the mirror surface.