I'd like my floors to SHINE & REFLECT!

Well, when I chose High, Medium or Low shine to my floors, I get nothing...the same dull texture. I'm I doing something wrong?

Is there a trick I'm not catching on to?

Thanks in advance!

Tami

The only reflection you will get is from the sky.

Horizontal surfaces particularly don't show up shiny much.

The common trick some people use is to make the floor transparent, and place a mirrored set of prims below it.

You can also use gradient textures to fake shinyness.

Scrubbing the floor a bit helps sometimes.

Just a quick check, do you have "Enable Bump Mapping and Shiny" turned on in your advanced graphics preferences? Shiny doesn't show up without it.

But yeah, it doesn't reflect avatars.

Theres a setting hidden in some debug options to turn on dynamic reflections, but even that only reflects other prims, not avatars, and its really pretty awful, and nobody will see it because nobody has it on.

Yes, while I searched (after my post) I discovered the "trick" in reflections. I went to one place that had such beautiful reflections in the floor and "poof" found the duplicates under the floor! Pretty savvy trick!

So, I'm working on that now.

Yes, I did the debug deal and WOW...man did that ever look bad! So, I don't have that turned on anymore.

Enabled the shininess and bumping, but I still see little difference.

Thanks so much for the help!

IMO, SL shiny and bumpy aren't worth the time it takes to toggle the setting. In other environments, I'm used to being able to turn up shiny until most of the object is obscured by white 'gleam' and use bump mappings strong enough to make a sphere into a walnut with just a plain color and some bumpiness. Maybe it's my system or settings, but, I've never seen anything but the slightest brightening from toggling shiny. I do see a change, just... not one that that is meaningful.

If there's a trick to making these settings worth bothering with, I'd love to know how.

The duplication method is how reflections are achieved in all OpenGL environments, fwiw, although the mechanics of it could be hidden from you by a 'reflection' setting that takes care of it automatically, just rendering a partially transparent duplicate of each polygon at the right angle. Distorted reflections are done by rendering the image from the point of view of the reflective object, then using that result as a texture. I'm pretty sure there isn't any way to do that in secondlife, though.

If you want to see nice reflective floors - go to WRONG (it's a shop) - yes of course it's done with semi-transparent floors and mirror image features below - but it is done very cleverly... best I have seen in SL )

Cat x

Real reflections are a ways off yet for SL. The "Dynamic Reflections" thing in the Client > Rendering options are a very rough first attempt, but the calculations are all still way off. They *do* reflect avatars. I've seen my own reflection in them. But the angle of incidence and the distance from the reflective surface was completely wrong, so when you stood where you expected to see yourself, you never could...

Shiny looks best on curved metallic surfaces. It's only so-so on flat or even cylindrical surfaces. But it can be used well, if you're careful. I have a build in the Humli sim that has some nice brass handrails in it that I made. If you have shiny turned on, they really do look metallic and shiny. Without it they are just a strange shade of yellow.

Does shiny maybe interact with full bright? If you select full bright, that object is sort of immune to shadows and lights from the sky and locally.

So, I would think Full Bright off would be the right choice.

Go to the mall on Naughty Island. Lots of examples of the semi-transparent floor technique. Also good use of 3d baked lighting.