Mirrors

[Gabriele Graves]

You can actually create a true mirrored floor with EEP now but it only works when you lower the land to expose the water.  The effect is stunning when done well however.

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

You can actually create a true mirrored floor with EEP now but it only works when you lower the land to expose the water.  The effect is stunning when done well however.

and very expensive to render

[Love Zhaoying]

[Love Zhaoying]

On 4/14/2021 at 9:17 AM, Mona Eberhardt said:

I'm bumping this topic, because it's 2021 and there are numerous applications of similar complexity to SL (from the GTA and Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport series to just about every other MMORPG you can name) that include both mirrors and immensely better global illumination (path tracing instead of ambient occlusion, with SL's implementation of ambient occlusion giving results that look more like direct lighting than actual global illumination). So, I'd like to second Whirly's suggestion; please get on board and watch that issue. I'll also get back to attending the Open Development User Group meetings and hopefully I can encourage LL's devs to look in that direction.

 

The info / links cause me to facepaw.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

You can actually create a true mirrored floor with EEP now but it only works when you lower the land to expose the water.  The effect is stunning when done well however.

The way you describe it, the "floor" is truly "wet" in this situation! Maybe it was fresh mopped? 
 

[NeoBokrug Elytis]

Reflections were a beta thing back in 2007.

Maybe when LL is working on moving from OpenGL to Vulkan, they can bring it back.

[Mona Eberhardt]

23 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

You can actually create a true mirrored floor with EEP now but it only works when you lower the land to expose the water.  The effect is stunning when done well however.

Yeah, but this isn't a good solution. It requires you to not only expose the water, but also have enough room to move the camera about. Not to mention two other limitations:

1. You have to turn everything on its side, which is a pain;
2. Linden water doesn't reflect materials (normal and specular maps).

This is why we need actual reflections. Honestly, I don't get it. Why do the GTA games have it and not SL?

[Gabriele Graves]

2 minutes ago, Mona Eberhardt said:

Yeah, but this isn't a good solution. It requires you to not only expose the water, but also have enough room to move the camera about. Not to mention two other limitations:

1. You have to turn everything on its side, which is a pain;
2. Linden water doesn't reflect materials (normal and specular maps).

This is why we need actual reflections. Honestly, I don't get it. Why do the GTA games have it and not SL?

No argument here, however when done right the effect is still stunning but yeah read up, I want real mirrors too!

[Aire Xaris]

Please don't bite my head off on this, but does it not stand to reason that if Sl water can reflect your avatars image, then technically isn't the ability to mirror, already here? Sorry if this has already been covered. I would also like to see the ability to use mirror on a prim surface

[Wulfie Reanimator]

37 minutes ago, Aire Xaris said:

Please don't bite my head off on this, but does it not stand to reason that if Sl water can reflect your avatars image, then technically isn't the ability to mirror, already here? Sorry if this has already been covered. I would also like to see the ability to use mirror on a prim surface

It's a lot more complicated than that.

Edited May 13, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Aire Xaris]

19 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

It's a lot more complicated than that.

I understand that, I also know that "mirrors" were used in a little game called Aerosmith World back in like 2008, which was absolutely nothing compared to SL. It's complicated, but I don't think its very far from impossible. 

[Coffee Pancake]

Mirrored surfaces aren't hard to implement - that's not the roadblock.

They are hard to do in a way that doesn't hurt performance - keeping in mind this is SL, and if given a new shiny toy, we WILL use it everywhere just because we can.

 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Oh yes, like - mirrored facelights

[Coffee Pancake]

13 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Oh yes, like - mirrored facelights

... and butt lights !

[NiranV Dean]

What mirrors need are some parameters (like lights) that allow you to configure resolution, reflection distance, reflection amount (like avatars, terrain etc) and more importantly whether the mirror should disable at distance (and which) so you can automatically have them turn off. Would be incredibly useful for say a small mirror in your bathroom that only needs to activate when standing in front of it. Also Object-Object Occlusion (as bad as it currently is) if it can cull reflective objects you could finally save a good amount of performance.

Edited May 14, 2021 by NiranV Dean

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Before Temporary Textures were turned off (for ALM I think?) I used to fake mirrors with a cropped snapshot stuck on the mirror face with the horizontal offsset given a negative amount. Given that Black Dragon can already do local poses, what are the complications involved in getting the current camera view into a temporary texture (which I suspect happens as part of the process of taking a snapshot), applying a surround masking of the mirror frame, and slapping it on the surface with the horizontal reversal?

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

What mirrors need are some parameters (like lights) that allow you to configure resolution, reflection distance, reflection amount (like avatars, terrain etc) and more importantly whether the mirror should disable at distance (and which) so you can automatically have them turn off. Would be incredibly useful for say a small mirror in your bathroom that only needs to activate when standing in front of it. Also Object-Object Occlusion (as bad as it currently is) if it can cull reflective objects you could finally save a good amount of performance.

and you somehow expect creators to pick conservative sensible settings before setting their creation no mod and sticking it up for sale

MIRRORS TO MAXIMUM !! (anything less is just weak mirrors!)

[NiranV Dean]

On 5/14/2021 at 6:50 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

and you somehow expect creators to pick conservative sensible settings before setting their creation no mod and sticking it up for sale

MIRRORS TO MAXIMUM !! (anything less is just weak mirrors!)

Haha. No. But should everyone be punished for stupid creators? That's what local settings are for.

[Aire Xaris]

On 5/14/2021 at 5:34 AM, NiranV Dean said:

What mirrors need are some parameters (like lights) that allow you to configure resolution, reflection distance, reflection amount (like avatars, terrain etc) and more importantly whether the mirror should disable at distance (and which) so you can automatically have them turn off. Would be incredibly useful for say a small mirror in your bathroom that only needs to activate when standing in front of it. Also Object-Object Occlusion (as bad as it currently is) if it can cull reflective objects you could finally save a good amount of performance.

And we have that with Projectors, (crude and limiting) but still already in place. I believe, I'm not a programmer or a science wiz by any stretch, but I think we're just talking a line of code here. I still haven't heard anyone say why if Linden water can reflect our images that the ability can't be turned on for other object surfaces. Linden water is simply mesh is it not? It stands to reason that the ability and physics are already in place. The only way you can see the water reflect is to turn on advance lighting and run SL graphics relatively high, I believe that alone would deter most people's overuse of mirror effect if they were to keep that requisite in place. I have a machine that can run SL in constant high graphics, but I don't, mid graphics with Advanced lighting turned on is sufficient. If anyone knows or has a link to the Linden water mystery I would appreciate it.

[NiranV Dean]

On 5/19/2021 at 9:28 PM, Aire Xaris said:

And we have that with Projectors, (crude and limiting) but still already in place. I believe, I'm not a programmer or a science wiz by any stretch, but I think we're just talking a line of code here. I still haven't heard anyone say why if Linden water can reflect our images that the ability can't be turned on for other object surfaces. Linden water is simply mesh is it not? It stands to reason that the ability and physics are already in place. The only way you can see the water reflect is to turn on advance lighting and run SL graphics relatively high, I believe that alone would deter most people's overuse of mirror effect if they were to keep that requisite in place. I have a machine that can run SL in constant high graphics, but I don't, mid graphics with Advanced lighting turned on is sufficient. If anyone knows or has a link to the Linden water mystery I would appreciate it.

Somewhat correct. Reflections can be seen with Basic Shaders (or any shaders) on. It does not require to have ALM on.

Mirrors are solely being declined because "performance" although it is arguably less impacting than reflections as Mirrors wouldn't require both reflections and the slow refractions. Another point is obviously the abuse of mirrors but i think thats stupid because A: options to limit them and B: projectors can be abused like that too (and often are) but projectors don't offer an easy limit option, although now that i say that i should add one. Any and all points against mirrors are completely nonsensical, can be easily fixed in a matter of seconds and don't require much work either. It is purely laziness and/or unwillingness.

[AdianGreytale]

If I had a Mirror I be looking in it more.

[Coffee Pancake]

Don't bump this, bump firestorm .. they are contributing the code for mirrors and AFAIK it needs some serious work (like making it work with ALM).

[Marigold Devin]

On 4/15/2021 at 1:32 AM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I'm old, it's considered forum edict in the old days of forums, to not push a post back up top more than a year or 2 old, when a new topic is perfectly fine,  I still run a car forum that's been around since 2002,  we auto lock threads older than 2 years old now,   so it's kinda my style too since I've been administrating it so long and we've got a funky database that's iffy with old topics from era gone by that get knocked back up.

I love the nostalgia of a necroposted thread.

I am such a dinosaur. 

10 year old video, I was sooooo excited about being able to make reflections in the water.

Ahhhh nostalgia.