Mirrors!

We have mirrors!

It's neat.

To activate mirrors in the First Look client, do Client Rendering and turn Dynamic Reflections on.

Here a hollow reflective sphere:


Finally I can see what expression is on my face:


Here's an avatar wearing a spherical mirror - reminds me of the M. C. Escher drawing:

how neat!

That's cool. Maybe LL could implement the feature as "reflection" and keep "shiny" the same. Many objects that were previously shiny are now unintentional mirrors. Still... wow.

This is nice and all. But sometimes we still would like the old shinny effect and maybe have a mirror in the scene. More like a new Feature for prims. Such as in the Panel with Light and Flexi. Dynamic Mirror this object maybe? Maybe I should not say we. Lets discuss

It should be an object property. The old shiny should still be available. They shouldn't be mutually exclusive, and transparency should work well with both.

The old shiny should be improved so it's not so zigzag looking but otherwise remain the same.

Reflection might should also be a parcel property, in case a landowner has reason to not want mirrors on their land.

They are only, kinda, sorta mirrors
the reflections are pretty weird, often not reflecting things close by but further away or off at odd angles.

This might be bad news for vampires.

What?! There's mirror now?! I'm trying out the new client now!

With the amount of shiny stuff in "The Future", theres a whole lot of crazy stuff going on when I fly around. Reflections often seem far too big, distant buildings with huge reflections of trees nearby. The Grail is all shiny all over... and is quite a mess with mirrors

A fun thing to try is standing between two mirrored surfaces. You get the expected near infinite reflections! (With weird scaling going on though, "further away" reflections get bigger rather than smaller).

Wow, can't wait to try it when I get home!

Do reflections work off semi-transparent objects? Reflections off glass windows would be really neat.

Related videos on youtube embedded on a thread at Second Citizen (free to view and join)

Direct link below, they show usage of these mirrors and behaviors.

http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=8288

I concur, it would be nice if the old shiny could be kept a separate option, as many people use it as a design element without necessarily wanting to have a mirrored surface there.

Um. Agreed with that. The new mirrored surface is really slow to render as well. My fps drop nearly half with that option on. Maybe there can be a limit to Mirror object like there is in Light object?

I agree, this is an amazingly fun to play with option, BUT, for those of us that use shiny surfaces as design elements, this really ought to be a feature by object, and not by default for all shiny surfaces. It's now completely impossible to make a surface that is both matte and shiny at the same time; brushed metals, for example. Between general slowdown, and the inability to use shiny surfaces as a design feature without reflections, I really have to say, please make this a feature as opposed to a binary, either on or off, option. As an aside, I notice the reflections work best on spherical surfaces. Thanks!

Setting the color to black gets rid of the "foggy" look if you're making a mirror.

Really cool and leet etc, but serious frame rate hit even with no apparent shiny/reflective surfaces in view here. Dropped from 40-45fps too 15-20fps in same place just by clicking the option on and off again.

Heck it was like using the 'proper' viewer again

ATi X1600Pro 512meg on AGP for the record.

We have reflective waters. Transparency and shiny together. I could look at it all day.

Definitely needs shiny to be back, reflections should also be the first thing to go if frame-rate is dropping for users, so we can have reflections but have them shut-off or revert to shiny if the going gets tough.

I also agree on having them limited too, and parcel optional, I don't want avatars walking around with 9000 reflective prims. And infinitive mirrors probably aren't a good idea in the long run.

So if we have them, I think a LOD system would be best with the sweet-spot around 15 fps or so (minimum playable speed IMO), or really we need an option when it comes to LOD agression I think.

For building, I agree. Being able to make something shiny but not reflective would be nice. Some things just don't look quite right having realtime reflections, but should still be shiny.

I did try to make a hall of infinite mirrors. What I got was an (in my opinion) nice fade-out effect around the edges of my avatar's reflection.
If I viewed one mirror reflected in another, basically the mirrors would show up as their prim's color. Good enough for me.

Likewise with Nirak Trescothick's post, I think the reflections did seem to work best on a spherical object.

I don't know what I'm doin right, but I see framerates of 20+ fps with reflections on or off. No difference. Woots!

Some thoughts on the "reflections vs shiny" issue: What if shiny was changed to have 6 levels instead of 3, with the first 3 levels (the levels we think of as "shiny low", "shiny medium" and "shiny high" being very minimal reflection. The upper 3 levels could be the new highly reflective effect.

6 levels of shiny would be good but the first three should be the normal, non dynamic reflective shiny, with the second three as dynamic reflective. So the options would look something like... "Static Low, Static Medium, Static High" and "Dynamic Low, Dynamic Medium, Dynamic High." Of course, to simplify matters, why not just have a "Object uses Dynamic Reflective Rendering" checkbox? There is an absolute huge difference between dynamic reflections and the previous shiny surfaces, and it would be very sad to have to pick between the two if they stay mutualy exclusive of each other; besides, in the real world, not every shiny surface is also reflective, right?

edit: I'm also not seeing much of an FPS hit at all either. However, for those that are, I think the suggestion I've made above would give people that option to tune thier creations for performance as well as aesthetic considerations.

Anyone given a close examination to complex multiprim objects with lots of seams that look pretty good when seen as shiny to see how they look when they are reflective?

I saw a spaceship in a sandbox with reflections turned on and it was quite seamy. The reflections didn't mesh very well.

Seams have never been very good with shiny. I'm not sure if the reflective stuff just makes that more obvious or if it is a new problem.

And people said I was crazy for saying this was possible!

The good: it works, and frame rate is cut less than I expected.

The good for me: it works WAY better on the Mac.

The bad: It's not even vaguely optically accurate. I would happily give up mirrored curved surfaces to get flat surfaces that work right.

The basic principle is that the mirrored texture needs to get rendered by reflecting the camera in the mirror.

Rendering fast reflections with OpenGL includes source code.

That look neat, the code. Though i don't think that exact method would work with SL -- see if the client has to render the whole screen (the DrawNinja() function) again for every mirror in the scene! o.o

Edited: Now that there's first look for mirror, can we have a "ghost" object as well? object type that will Never appeared on any mirror!