[sldev] Reviving a lost First Look feature - water reflections?

[Tim Shephard]

Sounds like a great plugin, though.

On 3/5/07, Dave Parks <davep at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> I should be clear that all of the various forms of "Dynamic Reflections"
> thus far have been experiments and should not be interpreted as a
> replacement for shiny.  The only reason they replace shiny is for
> testing.  The 57575 version used a shader to add perspective to the
> reflections, but that technique had to be thrown out due to
> inconsistencies in depth values between the fixed function and
> programmable pipelines on some cards (lots of people got no shiny when
> turning on reflections in that build).
>
> To be blunt, being able to fake good images does not make the reflection
> map hack worthwhile.  The performance hit in areas that are avatar heavy
> was too much, the visual quality was too low, and the aliasing on flat
> surfaces was too glaring.  Right now, we're leaning towards having two
> or three levels of reflectivity that would basically specify the
> "blurriness" of reflections in an object.  The current version would be
> an example of "medium" reflectivity (probably not the right word), which
> is an anti-aliased 32x32 cube map.  These maps would not be live and
> would not include moving objects like avatars, particles, or moving
> prims.  The live reflections would probably be a fourth option, but
> would only be applied to nearby objects.  The perspective correcting
> shader will not be making a comeback, so live reflections will always
> look terrible on flat surfaces.  The visual quality of the low res cube
> map is hit or miss depending on the area.  In some places, it looks
> fantastic, in others, quite dull.  Adding lights to the reflection pass
> would probably help a lot.
>
> As for planar reflections on arbitrary prims, that would require a
> full-blown portal system, which is something I could totally get behind,
> but I'm not planning on working on it myself any time soon.
>
> Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> > I was able to fake good images using the reflection code in First Look
> > 57575 on the Mac (you can see links to them in the thread 'How mirrors
> > work' in the first look forum, I believe) by taking a shot close to
> > the mirror. I don't know what the exact difference was between 57575
> > and the following releases, but the quality of plane reflections was
> > outstanding in that version.
> >
> > If the cube map hack requires 6 extra renders, then I'm really
> > impressed with the performance! What about supporting _up to 6_ planar
> > renders, and assigning them to the 6 closest plane surfaces with the
> > "mirror" tag set (or water plus five if there's water in draw
> > distance), with the camera set to the optically correct location for
> > each rendering pass? Curved surfaces could continue to use the
> > reflection of the sky box as they do now (this really looks better
> > than the low-res cube map you get if you turn on
> > RenderDynamicReflections in the current FL).
> >
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