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This way can simulate nice environmental reflections


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Hello everyone. Today I was building at my usual spot, and saw a jira about reflections that taught me a few fun ideas. One of them is about using projectors to simulate environmental reflections. Usually, one gets the simplistic light to dark gradient that we are used to getting when we turn on legacy shininess. However, with this way, it looks much better. Linked is a little video showing you how it looks. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08x1EjsfvQk

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An interesting feature of Second Life - kudos for pointing it out!

As they add more lighting features and more texture layers such as normal and specular maps, the appearance of Second Life is improving dramatically! :smileylol:

I only hope the new textures pipeline is powerful enough to keep up!

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First, this only works with the Advanced Lighting Model on. 

I used 6 boxes as projectors laid out as sides of a single large cube. Then, I divided a "cube map" into 6 pieces and applied each of them to the projector slot of each box. You can google cube map to see what it is. 

After that, the Radius was set to 20, Falloff to 0, Focus to 1, and the FOV to 1.5 in all the projectors. However, you may need to adjust the FOV to your liking. Once all this is done, the projectors can be set to 100 transparency, so they don't get in the way.

Lastly, the objects that will be reflecting (the sphere and the torus in my case) should be moved inside the large cube. For better reflection their Color should be pure black. Set a texture to their shininess even if a blank texture. Adjust the environment to 255 if you want a perfect reflection like the one in the video. That's it.

The objects don't have to be prims. Depending on the size of your objects you might need to move further away to see the reflections. Otherwise, they will look blurry all the time. No clue why this is so.

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markkemp wrote:

Interestingly this indicates the SL graphics engine is perfectly capable of handling reflections.

Just look at the Linden water. Be sure that you have set in the graphics peferences Water Reflections: Everything.

This also 'indicates' that the viewer indeed can handle reflections. You can even set the water smooth (no waves) to see the reflections on the water very clearly.

Without waves:

fairy.jpg

 

With waves:

 

Avatar-reflection.jpg

 

And there is this JIRA:

Real mirror reflections on prims

So far, with available viewers, only Linden water can show real reflections. But in the above link you can see a video and images of the real mirror reflections on a prim (self compiled adjusted viewer has been used).

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