Another trick that you can do is to render the scene from the mirror’s perspective. That way everything that needs to be seen in a reflection is there but also not taking up an entire extra room.
In Valve’s Source engine that is how the water reflections work. They can look absolutely perfect so long as you set props to reflect in the water.
That is called a render target and basically adds an entire full pass of frame computing (from this pov) which is why mirrors using this tech usually have an abysmal resolution. And generally some blur to hide it a little
It’s been a while but there was something in the doom 3 engine that made it pretty good at render target efficiency right? I seem to remember they were able to do mirrors well, and it was also a gimick they liked to do a lot with the computer terminals you could interact with.
They took this tech a step further with Prey (2006), which used the doom 3 engine, to make portals you could see and shoot through. I can’t remember if the portals were dynamic though.
Another trick that you can do is to render the scene from the mirror’s perspective. That way everything that needs to be seen in a reflection is there but also not taking up an entire extra room.
In Valve’s Source engine that is how the water reflections work. They can look absolutely perfect so long as you set props to reflect in the water.
That is called a render target and basically adds an entire full pass of frame computing (from this pov) which is why mirrors using this tech usually have an abysmal resolution. And generally some blur to hide it a little
This has been very interesting, thank you internet strangers!
:waves hands: cmon everybody what do we say
Nerds!
/s
It’s been a while but there was something in the doom 3 engine that made it pretty good at render target efficiency right? I seem to remember they were able to do mirrors well, and it was also a gimick they liked to do a lot with the computer terminals you could interact with.
They took this tech a step further with Prey (2006), which used the doom 3 engine, to make portals you could see and shoot through. I can’t remember if the portals were dynamic though.