water in reflection in SL

I've just noticed that SL water reflects the surroundings... Is this me just setting my visuals better ? Has it always been so ? Is it a new feature ?

I find it lovely, anyhow.

It got me thinking.. is there any way to have reflection other than in the water ? I"ve seen reverse builds giving the illusion of reflection, I've seen mirrors showing SL profile pictures... but never a reflecting surface other than water. Has anyone seen one ?

After lurking in the silent wings of these forums for a couple of months, I'm posting my first thread.. please go easy on me

I have thought that WindLight always had reflections in water, but never mirror-like that I noticed, only a vague reflection. But I never played with the water settings, just the sky and lighting.

What I HAVE noticed about the water is it bounces off the sides of my screen in a weird way.

I've never seen any other reflections, except there are some floors in large stores that I could swear are mirror reflections, but maybe they are reverse builds as you say. I was never able to cam underneath the floor to find out, due to camera spin.

It's a Windlight feature. It's off by default on graphics settings other than Ultra, I think. You can enable it under the custom settings in graphics preferences.

There are different water surfaces under World > Environment Settings > Environment Editor > Advanced Water > Water Presets. Try "Glassy" sometime.

Unfortunately the material shaders that make Linden water look so cool (including the reflections) aren't available to us to use in our own builds.

That said, you might want to take a look at this YouTube video (posted in a recent Torley blog) for an entertaining and quite clever workaround:

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/tnt/blog/2009/03/31/video-how-to-make-a-working-realtime-mirror

edit: be sure and watch it through to the end otherwise you won't catch what's being done (and no cheating and skipping ahead either!)

That was one of the things they said they would work on giving us along with windlight sim settings that could be pushed to the client, but these things apparently got abandoned.

Long, long ago in a release far far away we had basic access to reflections for a few months. But, it was buggy, ugly and didn't reflect properly and instead of fixing it they just removed it

It wasn't ugly - not at first. It was a big fps hit then, though.

There was one glorious First Look candidate where it actually looked good for flat and curved surfaces.

Rendering reflections is very time consuming. What happens is the camera is placed below the water plane and turned upside down, its view is then rendered into a texture. That texture is then applied to the semi-transparent water plane. This happens every frame.

So for every reflective surface - the view from the other side of the surface would need to be drawn. It's basically asking the video card to draw several Second Life's every frame.

I say almost because they speed things up by rendering a low resolution reflection. And then there's the fact that you can skip trivial items in the reflections. Like not drawing trees and boogers etc.

I only learnt all this recently. I is planning a career in being a geek.

Don't wish me luck...

By ugly, I meant that it didn't properly mirror the image, as seen in the photos Still, I would have loved to see them continue on this project. It was fun to play with

LOL - clever.

How do I access the Windlight feature? I went to Preferences, and then the Graphics tab, and I don't see where I have to go to enable Windlight. I'd really like to see realistic wind effects while I'm underwater.

To change the details of how water reflects, play with World / Environment Settings / Environment Editor / Advanced Water.

To get water reflections at all, Edit / Preferences / Graphics, click "Custom", and then Water Reflections, and choose Reflection Detail what it should reflect.

u is soooo doomed. Escape while u still can =p =)