I recently got curious if it would work and especially look pleasuring if we would be able to determine a decal as source for the part reflectance ; so a part with reflectance of 1 would show the decal image instead of the Skybox .
Hopefully the result may look similar to a matcap feature as seen in various 3d modeling software’s and 3d model viewers ; even though i dont know how much the optical result would be at a model which is affected by lighting ; especially under the new possibly upcoming lighting graphics.
But anyways this feature might utterly enhance the possibilities of the part reflectance by allowing multiple fake reflections and custom shiny/metal effects ; while probably not impacting the rendering performance / or at least giving no noticeable impact (hopefully) .
However ; iam already sorry if this is a unusable or not feasible idea ; but i wanted to share it nevertheless.
Also pardon please if this topic does not belong here but i didnt knew where to suggest it else.
Your idea is actually sortof what already happens. That is using the sun’s position for reflectance, but no other environmental data. Light technically reflects off of a surface, and conveys whatever colors it absorbed along the way. Roblox’s application is phsically accurate, however, they don’t add enough weight to how much light comes directly from the sun as opposed to bouncing off of the sky and clouds.
Would be useful for more appropriate reflections. For instance, out the window I may have a sun setting in the mountains, but inside I’d prefer parts to use a generic sci-fi reflection asset.
Realtime reflections are pretty expensive for stuff like mirrors because you need to render from the mirror’s perspective (as opposed to water where you can do tricks to use the rendered frame to simulate reflections)
Basically reflections use a “skybox” (they currently do this on roblox) but with reflection probes, you can pre-render a “skybox” to be used as the reflection map for nearby objects. I’m not sure how expensive this is (much better than realtime) but it looks really nice. Downside is you can’t see a reflection of realtime stuff but for light reflections on things like floors, etc, it looks amazing.
Might I add that doing this even once in VR (for the second eye) is largely at fault for the substantial performance challenges, so he’s not just saying that because it sounds dramatic.
The way passivey reflections work in most engines is, a cubemap is generated and projected onto a model as a supr fancy texture thing.
For roblox, the skybox cubemap, unfortunately, is the only cubemap used when creating the little reflection effect. It looks horrid, in most situations
As AbstractAlex has mentioned, reflection probes are ####### magical. (They generate the cubemap from the perspective of a probe! ) If we’re gunna get reflections, we’re probably gunna get reflection probes or something very very similar.
…but the performance impact of real reflections ? …hmm
) If we’re gunna get reflections, we’re probably gunna get reflection probes or something very very similar.