Mirror Distortion Problem

[leejk]

Hello,

I am seeing a problem where objects reflected in a mirror are distorted. I've had this problem before when looking at the mirror thru a sheet of glass, and corrected the problem by removing holes that were in the glass for a handle to mount. This time though, I am not looking thru any glass. In the attached screenshot, the mirror is distorting the door handle that is on the outside of this cab. What can cause this?

thx

[joconnell]

Looks like smoothing groups in your mesh are off. Try a) removing all of them in the mesh object b) put on a smooth modifier with auto smooth turned off or c) remake the mesh with only quads.

[leejk]

Thanks. I have tried re-creating the mesh since it is import from CAD, but still have the same issue. I'm beginning to think it has something to do with the fact that the mirror surface is not flat, but has a slight curve to it. It's interesting to note that I can render this in mental ray without issue, so possibly something is not quite right with vray.

rgds

[TheLooopCGI]

We often have the same problem. Smoothing groups in 3dsmax are often problematic when it comes to importing CAD files.

I assume you have the nurbs from CAD converted into polys, right? If so, just select all the polygons of the mirror object and press detach to create a new object which resets the normals. After that autosmooth the polygons again and all should be fine.

EDIT: you might need to fix the topology after that a bit... all those triangles and strange faces don't go well with smoothing groups

[leejk]

I finally had to resort to another importer. I imported the mesh object using Polytrans this time, and the distortion problems went away. So indeed it is a corrupt mesh object somehow.

thx