Shiny Floors

I've seen several stores and other places that have really pretty shining floors, now I want my store to have the same type of shininess to the floors, is there something I have to do in the edit area or is it specific textures that do this? If so where do I get these textures?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'shiny'.

If you mean they are literally shiny, and have specular lighting that seems slightly wet, then the option is in the Edit menu, on the Textures tab, labeled as 'Shininess'. It has 4 levels, none, low, medium, and high, and each washes out the true texture more, while giving a higher level of shine.

If you mean it has a reflection in the floor, this is actually faked. Essentially, you copy the scene from above, and reverse it below, giving the floor a slight transparency (Texture tab again, top right corner, 0-100)

And if you mean that it goes, like a neon sign, then that is again in the texture menu, near the top right corner, labeled as 'Glow' on a scale of 0-100.

My apologies maybe I didn't make it clear what I meant. Instead I will show you and hope you get wheat I mean. I find it hard to explain.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hMbO6MwMCY0/Sa6Pk5hRGmI/AAAAAAAAExU/9Jhk3Uzp_M0/s1600-h/AD)Love+Sofa+couple+4.png

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_hMbO6MwMCY0/Sa6Pl8oyXoI/AAAAAAAAExk/s1dvJ9O5mvk/s1600-h/AD)Love+Sofa+single+5.png

Look closer. There's no shine there at all. The floor is transparent, and there's an upside-down version the room built below it.

It's a very old trick, but it fools a lot of people, if it makes you feel any better.

SL cannot render reflections on any surface except water.

Those type of floors look great... until someone with any alpha on their primmed clothing or shoes walk over it, then it gets REALLY distracting due to the alpha glitch (or any word you wish to describe this behavior).

Haha oh wow it totally had me fooled there! I walked over t stores flooring and coold see my heels became a sort of whitish transparency. I think I'll skip that in my store I want people to be looking at the creations and not their shoes LOL. Thanks for all the help people Much appreciated!

If there is one innovation that I could wish for in SL tomorrow, it would be to have true reflections on objects. I understand that it currently constitutes quite an issue of load on the system but I'm sure it will be implemented one day.

One thing you can do that looks pretty good is to overlay the floor with a texture that has random white to transparent gradients on it. That gives a nice polished effect.

They had this, in fact it might still be in the debug menu. There are quite a few videos on youtube like this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3MrkOsE8nY

It's a feature they toyed with adding before the windlight version of the client although it was still on the debug for quite a while afterwards but it didn't look the same. It didn't make the grade because it was like taking a belt sander to your graphics card if there were more than a few shiny things in a busy place.

Yes and no, in the debug settings in the Advanced menu there (at least used to be) a setting... renderDynamicReflections... something along those lines. It was in the early stages of development, and, although it's not considered a feature, the rudiments of it are (were?) in place.

renderDynamicReflections has been gone for quite a while now. And it was never particularly good when it was available. It was just a simple cubic environment mapping, which wasn't even remotely close to optically correct. It did a terrible job of accounting for the location of the camera when deciding what to reflect. The more one played with it, the more one found the results to be increasingly annoying, rather than compelling or interesting.

You didn't try it post windlight, did you?

If memory serves, it disappeared when the first Windlight viewer went main. Is that not correct?

If you think high heels look bad on that sort of floor, try being in a floofy Furry avatar, with an alpha-textured tail and alpha textured body fur fluffs. Looks like you're falling apart...

I don't think so, I remember reflections were more correct, but less defined towards the end of it's availability, and glow was around as you can see in the video I linked.

Wasn't renderGlow a debug setting long before Windlight? Again, if memory serves, it became an official feature when Windlight went main, but it was available in Debug for quite a while beforehand. I notice in the video it was accessed via Debug, not via the Texture tab, so it very likely was not a Windlight viewer.

In any case, nothing in the reflections in the video looks optically correct. It looks just as off as it always was, only a bit more blurry so it's maybe a little less obvious. In all the shots where you can see the reflective object and its surroundings at the same time, you can very clearly tell that the images being reflected are not from the correct vectors with respect to the camera POV.

Don't get me wrong; it's a damned sight better than the shiny shader we've got now, so I really wish they'd kept it. But still, it wouldn't produce a reliable optically correct reflection like the illusion in the OP's pics.

Yes, for nearly a year before windlight, but the ability to change the level of glow wasn't available then, in was pretty much on of off. Only some of the reflective items in that video are glowing.