I got it off of this video, except there's a couple of elements from gmod that you'll need to know that are different than this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsBsuhz1Ts

Well, you should near done with your photo. It'll be around somewhere like before you put noise or blurring it, so don't do this after. It'll look like garbage then, because it won't fit in. Anyways, let's get started.

So for this, just use your submaterial tool and this addon: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=394188041 and submaterial the things you want to make reflections out of. For this, I chose helmets and rifle metal, since they're the most "shiny" in my scene, and will probably have the most visible reflections out of the rest of my scene.

Now that you've got your reflection poster in photoshop, set it to multiply and it should look something like this:



Okay, so now we have it set to multiply, we can select the quick selection tool, and then we'll select what we see in our image.



Just click on all the objects that are in the image, because the quick selection tool will just select whole objects because of the black difference color around it. There should be a dotted line around what you select.



Now that you've got it all selected, press select and mask up on the top.

You've selected and masked your selections, but don't worry; it should look like a red nightmare. It should look something like this:



Change your values to what I've got here:



Click okay and then make a new layer from the bottom right corner, and then click on your colors on the left side. Change your color to black, and then click ok.



Now, do the command, Shift+F5, and you should get a thing like this, and then click ok. AFter that, just do, Ctrl+D.

For this, you can either flatten your image and copy it, swirl it, or just get another photo of something similar. I usually go for something that has half of a sky and half of a similar environment. For this demonstration, I'll be using this photo:



This is where the fun begins. Drop your photo into photoshop from files, and prepare for eternal suffering if you have tons of things you want to reflect like me. If you've got a lot of stuff like I do, you'll have to use multiple copies of your reflection photo.

A couple things to note if you're sorta new to photoshop is that you can use Ctrl+T to select/move around the photo you're selected on. While in this mode, you'll have to rotate/resize a lot, so keep that in mind. Cropping's easy, since all you do is rasterize the layer and then take the rectangular marquee tool, select what you want to delete, and then press Backspace. Just so you don't have to keep dropping in new photos individually, just select one of your reflection photos, press Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V and a copy of it should appear. Then press Ctrl+T to reshape and rotate it for another area. You can also change opacities of the layers if you need to be able to see a little. Just remember to put them all back at 100% when you're done.

Back to it, your photo should look something like this unholy nightmare.



Now, hold Ctrl and press the layers in your group, ONLY the ones of the reflection image. Make sure all of them are set to 100% Opacity too. Once you've selected them, right click on one of them and click Merge Layers.



Now, left click on the photo icon of the black photo layer, and then right click on the photo of it, clicking on Select Pixels.



Now, it should look like this:



Select the top layer (the one with your reflection images) and make a mask layer on it.



Should look like this now:

This step isn't that hard, since all you're doing is brushing around the edges of the reflection areas. First, set your layer to around 75%, being selected on that mask layer.



Your brush should be soft, with the hardness set to 0%, and the color black (the color should already be black from earlier, so you should already be fine) The rest of it doesn't really matter, but if you need reference, here's mine:



Now, this is where it's gonna take a helluva long time. Take the rectangular marquee tool, and select individual parts of objects that are gonna be reflected on. Also, make sure you're still selected on the mask layer, not the first one.



Go back to your brush tool and begin brush along the outsides of your object, WITHIN the selected area. The selected area you've got now has you can do stuff inside, because the it traps everything you do within that box. You can also disable and reenable your group to see where you need to put extra darkening if you need to. After brushing for a while, your black brush outline should look something like this:



Well, now you've done a single object. Good luck on doing the rest of them. Just press Ctrl+D, select a new object, repeat.

After suffering for an endless amount of time, it should finally look something like this nightmare:

So, now that we've gotten the reflections we want darkened and on the objects, now we have to blur them. In real life, unless you're looking at something like a mirror, objects aren't going to have exact reflections. Even your phone screen doesn't have perfect reflections. So, because of that, we have to blur and distort them. You can do this almost any way you want to, using the smudge/blur tool, other filters (like spherize), etc., but for this, I'm going to use a combination of some.

Starting off, we'll first need to select the original part of the layer and to get rid of that chain between them. Click it to disable it, and make sure you're selected on the original left layer.



For this, I'll use the twirl filter to blur/move stuff. You can use all sorts of filters and blurring methods, but this is how I like to do it.



For when you're using this filter, don't go overboard, or it'll look like literal garbage. Make your twirl thing from the values of -20 to 20, at the highest/lowest. I'll be doing -15 for this.



After clicking okay, this is what it looked like for me:




If you want, you can stop right here and continue onto the next step. Personally, I like taking the smudge/blur tools and going into the layer, making small adjustments where needed.

You'll probably have to do a lot of personal touches with this one. First, disable the bottom two layers and delete them, then look at your horrendous concoction you've brewed.



Well, it looks like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but you're going to have to make a lot of edits to make it look half decent. Here we go. For this example, I've taken my eraser tool and put it at different values and opacities to try and erase stuff, as well as setting the total opacity of either the group or the layer itself down a bit.



Even after getting rid of some, you'll still have to get rid of more, because this doesn't even look remotely good. Let's try and get rid of it:



It's good enough, no one will notice.

Here's an example of a before/after.




meh they good enough

also you can set your smudge brush to lighten to go back over something and add the reflection again, if you didn't delete your two layers