Mirror effect in ballroom?

I have taken the plunge to create the mirror effect in my ballroom dance floor. I'm getting very close but wanted to ask on opinions as far as floor texture. At first I went with a transparent texture which somewhat works but does not give the mirror appearance.

What about 60% gray with full shine?

Anyone else done this? What did you use?

I noticed at Avilion Mist they have like an etched logo texture on their ballroom floor.

A mirror effect on a dance floor??? Wow,,, sounds fantastic! I've never seen one. Please let me know when you have it all set. Loving to dance as much as I do,,, I'd really look forward to visiting!

Remind me to wear nice underpants when I come dancing...

I bet the etched logo was on a separate prim.

I personally reccomend an 'etched stone' kinda feel. Like giant stone blocks, if that makes sense, about 50-60% transparent, No shininess (Does shiny work with transp?)

I think that if you use something without any decoration at all it would be too smooth, not look as good.

If somebody gets a mirror illusion that good, I want to see it. Uh. Well, you know what I mean.

I've done it even with a wood texture, tinted very, very dark, and just made slightly transparent in the editor... I forget how much, but I remember it looked best much more opaque than I'd expected. I'm pretty sure I ended up turning off Shiny altogether, but this was pre-WindLight, so YMMV. (Does Shiny even work with any kind of transparency in WindLight?)

Giggle....

I just tested it out of curiosity and found a few things.

A. Qie is right, it doesn't take much ransp on it. Works best I think between 10 and 20 %, 15 looks nice to me.

B. Shiny doesn't work with transp at all in windlight.

C. Even without the shiny it can look good.

I tested it with a single plane and a single(two) chair. I used a stone deco floor texture, set to 15% transp, and I think it looks pretty good.

60% transp looks like a perfectly still, perfectly clean lake or something.. more reflection than floor.

30% looks like a high shine, and allows brighter colours to still mask 'reflections' naturally.

20% is a mid-shine to me. Like rough stone that's been polished for a while

15% is a low-shine

10% is 'natural shine' (Like a naturally shiny stone, but not polished)

5% is almost no shine at all

Do you have an example of the texture?

If you've never seen a ballroom floor with the mirror effect please checkout the Avilion Mist ballroom. An amazing build, they completely duplicated an entire castle and turned it upside down. The ballroom encompasses an entire sim pretty much.

I'll send it to you in-world, it's really not great unless going medieval, but it was the first stone with any 'seams' that I saw in inventory.

ETA:: I mostly only have stone brick type textures, and the one I used to test was the first stone deco one I found in inventory.

What color is it (I suppose I'll see) I'm wondering if a tint of gray is what I need.

Not just upside down, unless the shapes being duplicated are themselves bilaterally symmetrical. Consider mirroring a spiral staircase, for example: upside down will look like stairs into the water; to look mirrored it has to be... well, mirrored. This is one of those places where a mirror-duplicating script is handy; such scripts are also used for various prim attachments (e.g., shoes) and assemblies that have symmetrical left and right parts.

This particular texture is gray stone with a bit of an offwhite centerpiece to the tiling, and it works well. I think darker textures will work a lot better than light, as the light ones seems to wash out the 'reflection'

Your right, there is some difficulty in just turning something upside down unless it's at a 90 degree? Not sure. I know all the items in my ballroom had to be done individually. I did not duplicate the pose balls because they disappear when your dancing on them.

Still I need to add a few more items, maybe potted flowers.

This is probably crazy, but can you edit water to be flat somehow and use water reflections ?

You can make windlight water look perfectly flat and everything, but it's only for your own client, and isn't possible to transfer over to everyone else.

Or put the reflecting water just underneath a semi-transparent flat surface?

Sim water level is done for an entire sim, so unless you can terraform down to below waterlevel it's not possible.

But if you can it can make soe stunning effects

Yep that's what I meant, only WL people would see it but that will be most non bots soon.

I really did not want it to look like a water reflection. What I'm after is a mirror effect. Sounds kind of the same but different

There's no such thing as a true mirror effect in SL. You can if you want turn shiny on which can look nice.

There are some places though with 'mirror' floors, but they have transparent floors with an exact replica of the room above, except turned upside-down.

Noone said there was O.o, though that would f-ing rock.

This thread is about the fake mirror, the transparent floors, since we can't have a true mirror.

Also mentioned was linden water being used, though it would berather wavy unless everyone specifically set their water to look smooth and glassy.

keep in mind the prim counts when doing the mirror effect

I tried it once and was a bit surprised at the amount of prims it took to mirror just the simple stuff (and if you have signs or anything, be sure to flip the image on the mirrored ones so they look revered thus mirrored)

I find you can usually get away with using far less detail in the 'reflection' with the same awesome effect. Most people aren't inspecting your reflection, it's just something that adds to atmosphere.

So, you can take some super-prim items and halve them often, for vendor walls you can take out the actual item prims, and just leave a blank wall, or take a snapshot of the wall with them there and then texture the reflection's wall with that snapshot.

Things like that