Reflective floors without hiding hair/dresses?

The reflective floors I've seen are really a nice feature. Duplicating 5m or so of what is on top to below the floor and then making the floor partially transparent.

The problem is if your hair or dress has alpha textures..it's a killer!

Anyway around that?

As far as I know, the only way around it is to create the same effect via a floor texture without an alpha layer. Which means either being very good at creating a texture or create the entire thing as usual and then take a picture and turn it in to a texture.

Just take the dress off and explain that you're not really naked but it's the floor doing it

No way around this, no.

All "reflective" floors require transparency for the floor, so you can see an upside down "mirrored build" that exists below the floor. Since most hair, high heeled shoes, furry tails, and many skirts also use transparency, the alpha sorting glitch comes in and screws up the effect.

Incidentally, that is also why you only see the room reflected, and not the avatars or their attachments.

I have heard rumors of naked ballroom dancing events.....only rumors of course *gulp*.

I'll have to try the upside down thing but how the heck am I going to get a wide enough shot of the entire ceiling? My ballroom is 85x40.

You generally don't bother. Just get the part of the build that covers the first 5 to 10 M up from the floor, and have the "ceiling" beyond that be solid black. This creates the effect that what is near the floor seems to reflect in the translucent surface, while what is farther away is too far to see the reflection.

With a bit more work, you can take a couple of shots and match them up in a photo editor to give you the full thing.

Well, I know some people are good enough to do that - I probably could not manage it.

Would it help at all if you put some emblem in Photoshop and cut out around it and used that for the transparent floor? I know I've made alpha textures in Photoshop that for some reason do not hide my hair like I've seen with PSP.

Nope. Even a 1% transparency applied to a otherwise completely opaque texture makes the alpha sort glitch happen. But the exact angles you see it at can appear to be somewhat random. So you might not see it sometimes, and it be glaringly obvious from a slightly different angle. Especially if the center of the floor prim is closer to your camera than the avatar with the alpha textured hair.

Invisiprims also show this glitch. They are used in most high heeled shoes, and often make large areas around the feet subject to problems with any alpha textured floor. Or with water surfaces.

This is going to be tricky...

1. Create your "below ground mirror image" objects, place them, make the floor semitransparent.

2. Select all of your ballroom above the floor and move it way up out of the way. (You MAY be able to use Advanced/Hide Selected and then select all of the ballroom that's in the way of your picture. I'm not sure which is the more tedious method.

3. Set your draw distance sufficiently high so you can fly up and see the whole floor.

4. Take a picture. Use Hi Res Snapshots to Disk and take as many pixels as you can.

5. Fly up, gather the rest of your ballroom, and edit it back down into position on the floor.

6. Create a Photoshop file that's the same dimensions (in pixels) as your floor. If it's 85x40 m, use a size of, say, 850x450. Or for more detail, 1700x900. Paste the picture you took into this file, and resize/realign as necessary to get it to fit.

7. Add any additional filters or effects like light reflections, etc.

8. Reduce the size of the image to 1024x1024 and save it as a PNG file.

9. Upload it and apply the texture to your dance floor.

10. Remove the now-redundant under-floor "reflection" objects.

NOTE: After all this work, you may still find the solution unsatisfactory...because the floor texture will not exhibit parallax...the phenomenon by which objects farther away change their apparent position relative to closer objects as our eye position moves. I suggest trying it with a small test build first.

Further note: If your ballroom floor is more than just one prim, you'll need to take that into account. I suggest taking a shot and processing as above for each floor prim. The business of matching up the edges is left as an exercise for the student (thank god).

I'm beginning to wonder if I should hire someone to do this.

If your inworld photo skills are not great and/or you are not real comfortable with some sort of photo editing package (photoshop, gimp, etc..), then you might want to consider hiring it out.

However, as Lindal said, the result might not be satisfactory to you, so you would still want whomever you hire to first do a smaller test area (for much less L$) for you to look at and decide if you want to try the larger project.

I've done cut-outs (windows etc.) using Photoshop that do not hide my hair at all?

It generally depends on how close the prim's center is to you. In theory, the prim whose center is closer is the one you see as "in front".

So for a wall, if you have a wall with an alpha-textured window, and you're avatar with alpha textured hair is closer to the camera than the wall, you see the hair as "in front". If they are on the other side of the window, you see the wall as "in front". All that is as it should be.

But if you are an an angle to the wall, they are on your side of the wall, but the center of the wall is closer to you than the center of the prims in the avatar's hair? Glitch!

Floors are more sensitive to this, since it is much more lileky that the center of the floor prim is closer to you than the hair on the avatar.

The order of things also changes when items are linked. So, two walls forming a 90 degree corner, both with alpha textures, will interfere with each other worse if unlinked, than if the two are linked together.

It seems like Avilion Mist has worked around this somehow, I don't think I have problems there.

My shoes and some dresses often have problems there.

it's prim expensive to me..i'm a prim saver and hate the alpha glitch..i would much rather work with light and shadows and optical illusions..they add so much more i think..

The floor shine is neat until i walk on it and see i am wearing clogs instead of my boots i love more than the floor hehehehe