Reflective Texture

#1 reflective textures happen with the alpha layer in the .png file. . .basically a greyscale layer where (depending on how it is being used) white represents full relectiveness and black equal no reflection. . .this layer can also be used for opacity

#2 So, short of editing the engine, there is no support in TGE for reflective textures?

is that correct?

#3 Do you mean reflective or environment mapping.

By this I mean do you want the 'surface' to reflect everything including the player and other objects or simply a set texture a.k.a environment mapping?

#4 "... 'surface' to reflect everything including the player and other objects " - I've always asked myself if that would be possible? Wouldn't that be cool? Water reflecting the trees or rocks around it, the player, etc.!
Any ideas anyone??

#5 I think I accidentally did it with a model in milkshape, it was reflecting my skybox near as I could tell ;)

Don't ask me HOW I did it.

#6 Yes I got this to work and it is correct. If you adjust the "white" amount on the alpha channel (in photoshop) it will make the object more reflective. The closer the portion of the alpha channel is to black, the les reflective the item will be.

#7 Yes, but how would you make a waterblock reflect nearby trees, buildings, NPCs, vehicles, etc.?
Anyone ever thought about that? Melv, do you have an idea - you seem to know the water stuff quite well, if I look at your recent fluid improvements...
I saw a screenshot of Morrowind (will be a great game, I think!!) lately, they had beautyful water reflections of an old castle nearby a lake or something ...

#8 Most of what is being requested here is mirrors of various transparencies / reflectivities.

Most of what I've seen around is the same thing but 'faked' e.g environment mapping. Take a static image a partially reflect it rather than dynamically calculate a view and render this onto a surface.

I'm busy with this replicator doo-dar. I will have a better look @ the different texturing methods tomorrow night such as bump/reflection mapping though.

I'll post my results here.

#9 Stefan, normally, to make like a reflection in water, you draw the scene twice, with the part under the water drawn with an alpha darkended poly over the top.

Reflection textures can use a few methods, with cubic env mapping being probably the best (what you can do, is render to texture 6 sides of a cube at the point to reflect around, then use those in a cubic env map). Although its hardware dependant and WAY too slow :))

Phil.

#10 Phil-
you mean that all the submerged terrain would have an alpha darkened "layer" on it and would be rendered a second time?
What do you think how the fps would be affected by this water reflections? Do you think it would be worth a try?

#11 Yes, to achieve a true reflection, the reflected objects must be rendered twice. Water is a particular handy choice since you just flip the scene vertically at the water level.

The "darkening layer" he describes just serves to make the reflection look like a water reflection, rather than a perfect mirror image.

#12 That reminds me of the old Duke3d.. Duke would see himself (reflection) in the mirror and say "damn i'm lookin good".


Randy...

#13 Any hint / concept on how this water reflections could be done?
I've found some interesting parts concerning the overall world rendering in game.cc, guiTSControl, gameTSControl, and, of course in fluidRender, ..., but I'm a bit lost in the code... could someone push me in the right direction where to start?
Things like: Where is the final scene renderend in the end? How would I lay a darkened layer above the submerged terrain?
Thanks for any comment!

#14 Mhm, nobody interested in getting water reflections?
Do you think it would be enough to include one more render pass in "game.cc" (e.g. after whiteout, blackout and invincible passes - by the way, what is the invincible pass doing?) with a stencil buffer and flipping the scene around the water level?
Thanx for any suggestions!

#15 I think no one is really interested becuase of the frame drop it will probably cause. The env-map looks good, altough its a fake reflection..... a real reflection would look better, but it'll cost framrate...

#16 That's probably true, but it would look much more realistic to have all near objects reflected...!
Hm, I guess the rendering part in game.cc wouldn't be the right place, looks like there are only the "overlay" filters rendered, not really the scene...
o.k., so I'll do some more investigation by myself...
Later!

#17 the reflective effect on water is good, yes that take cpu, who care if they are a option into the graphic that said (enabled reflexion on water) ? geforce3 card etc... can handle that..... :)

regards

#18 Stefan
Now we are more than one and a half years older now, and we have got ever faster machines and videocards. Do you have any plans to do that reflective water now ? Or implemented yet ? :)
I think its will be a must soo,n for TGE, if we are thinking about to keep it -not uptodate-, but fresh.

#19 If you look at the MirrorSubObjects, you could possibly apply that to a waterblock. Essentially a waterblock is a flat plane with perturbations for the surface. So, cloning the mirror's functionality (and possibly using the changes that I applied to masked mirror surfaces resource) you could attain what you want.

- Brett

#20 They already have a sample of mirror reflection in their engine located in this subdirectory:

\Torque1.51\Torque Game Engine 1.5.1 Demo\demo\data\interiors\mirror\mirror01.dif

The question is how do we create this real time reflection?

I work in 3Dsmax and Constructor, I want to know how to create a real time reflection in my models. I've been looking around some of the torque documentation but they only show me the "fake" reflection tutorials.