Ok, so how in de heck do the Bedazzled team....

....do all those neat shiny reflective puddles that I'm seeing in the preview photos? Baccara? Foxy? Whose leg do I have to hump to get a behind-the scenes tour and a building texturing lesson? Are those reflections dynamic, meaning that they look correct no matter what angle you look at them from? Or do they only look "right" when you look at them from a particular angle?

I'd LOVE a tutorial on how to accomplish this eye-candy.

Hiya Unhygienix! Baccara is of Spellbound Events, not Bedazzle.

Jimmy "Texturemaster" Thomson is responsible for the graphics wizardry as you see it. He has done some -- correction, a LOT -- of amazing things to overcome the inherent limitations of the SL graphics engine, and heck... it is damn cool, isn't it? Jimmy has posted a number of tutorials sharing his tips and tricks before:

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and perhaps he will post a tutorial specifically about these reflections as well in his own words. I've let him know.

When Chinatown opens, you can camscan and see for yourself how the magic is made. Yay!

I won't give away the secret until Chinatown is open to the public, but I will answer a couple of your questions. Yes, they are dynamic, and yes, they look correct from whatever angle you approach (well, almost every angle).

The magic is actually simpler than you think. I can promise you once you see how it was done, you will say "why didn't I think of that?" I know I did. Trust me, you won't need a tutorial.

I certainly don't want to ruin the secret either, but if it's the "trick" that I think it is, it would require an enormous amount of prims in order to be used effectively, and also unfortunately be very difficult to accomplish in builds on the regular grid, unless either the sim is one of the older terraformable ones or the build is sufficiently high off the ground.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is a new bit of magic Please, oh please let this be something easy to apply to other builds, even at ground-level.

Oh, and sorry that I mixed up the two groups; both Spellbound and Bedazzled have blown me away with their themed builds; I certainly meant no offense to either group.

My guess is particles. Since they always face the avatar no matter what direction you are coming from, they would always appear the right direction. But it's only a guess and would not be surprised one bit if I was wrong.

my two cents, i think chinatown is specially optimised for this very special reflection,

in short terms chinatown is mirrored under the ground with a road where actually the water drops are cutted in the alpha ed texture, the way chinatown is built (as far as i see on the screenshots) enhance this effect (black sky, flags allover that provide the main sense of deepness in these reflections)

it looks like this is actually the famous trick, already used in some other games like custom made half life maps.
would be nice to be ablet to do this but primcount limit meh ^_^

Well, they did test reflections in that room near Gravity Space Station.

In fact they mirrored the entire room and made the floor partly translucent.
Also nice they added the impression of fog there with some neat textured transparent streaks from the window. Just makes it hard to move th cam around there

*meow*
Leopard Loveless

Personally, I would take a screen shot and build a large two dimesional wall, then stretch andn position the screenshot over the n prims, instead of selecting the build and rotating.

To achieve a the full "reflective" effect.. you do have to mirror your objects and textures. Your choice of light and color will also go a long way...oh and knowing how to alpha texture your prims.. I myself have played around with this effect.. and for me..gives a whole new meaning to the atmosphere of a build

It's a very nice effect too, having seen it. But it falls over completely as soon as anyone enters the room and is (obviously) not also reflected. It's a shame.

that's how you spot the vampires.

i figured out reflections after seeing a couple screenshots and it does involve prims but there are ways to keep the number way down if you're oh so clever and sneaky.

I didn't examine it all that thoroughly, though I did notice the transparent floor. That was a spectacular job. Really nothing else like it in SL that I've seen. While at a glance it seems like it would be obnoxiously prim heavy, I don't see why you couldn't take a screenshot of it and texture the lower walls. It looked really great though. And it also showed off where SL needs improvement. So that was like an extra bonus.

And y'all, this ain't givin' away secrets. Showin' you how he does it ain't gonna make you that caliber of a builder. All talkin' about this does is make SL look a little better. I don't think we gotta worry about puttin' him outta business. He's way better than most of us.

not sure ^_^

all I can say is... welcome to Particles 101

Shadow

Seen IT, and went PoooF in my HeaD MaHaWaHaWAhA JimMy U ROK

note: not particles, or youd see the same perspective from every angle i.e. not a reflection.

note: this is an OLD trick being applied VERY effectively (from what Ive seen in the screenies)
one of the first places I remember seeing this was in Bonifacio in the Venice build a small cafe owned by Amazon Feaver had a mirror surface floor.

The only prim conservative way I could think to do this probably isnt what theyre doing as i cant see it coming out as good as the pictures look.

It's a spectacular job, you guys will love it. Though I will say that the first time I saw the "mirrored underground build" trick to get water reflections was in a build by Starax nearly a year ago, though not as well executed as in Chinatown. I later copied Starax in a "through looking glass" build of my own.

I see that ppl already gave you a good part of the answer Unhygienix, the objective of Bedazzle is to share with the community to improve visual quality of how everyone build inside SL. So I generally try to publish tutorials for new visual FX we're working on.

Here is some tutorial from our website :
http://bedazzle.grfx.at/portal/modules.php?name=Content

Now that Chinatown is open I'd have more time to prepare tutorial and explain the 'behind the scene' of the UL building. Here is the subject I'd like to talk about...

- Tips and trick for reflective surfaces.
- Lighting system (like we have in Chinatown).
- Weather system.

Jimmy, I went there last night and was very.....VERY impressed with how good everything looks. I was assuming that the SL website photo was a "best possible angle, pic taken from a souped up graphics card 'puter". Everything looks extremely good, though, and I like very much the way how your team left a lot of the walls as phantom so that a curious builder could fly around and look at things from above, below, behind, etc. I was disappointed to see that the "reflections" make use of the "as above, so below" effect that I've seen used in a few other builds (this is the first time I've seen that effect used so extensively); I was really hoping that it'd turn out to be something completely new or prim-friendly, because I get the impression that it'd burn through prims for most people to try to utilize.

Everything in there looks simply phenomenal, and thank you also for leaving up the lighting example in the adjacent sim; it makes use of the same idea that I saw in a tutorial (may even have been made by you, jimmy) that I grabbed from Princess Medici's sim.

I did notice that the "chinatown" build only takes up a small portion of the actual sim; was this because of time constraints, or because the visual effects that the team employed was prim-heavy enough that it burned through the sim's prim limits?


Beautiful build though; it really does take a left turn and hook around some of SL's built-in graphical limits.