Front Row like Reflections

Unity Engine
1

I’m attempting to build a gui similar to the front row black environment with subtle reflections, but in 3D. Is there any way to achieve this reflections/environment with unity pro?

Thanks.

2

Yeah, render to texture can do this. You pick a camera to render as a texture. I think it is a matter of drag and drop, not sure I dont have pro, but yes you can do this. Very cool pro feature, you can use it for things like security cameras cameras too.

Bill

3

Any pointers onto how to do this thorugh render to texture?

4

Do you have a enviroment map (skybox) that you use ? It it is allright that it is static, you do not even need a pro but can just use the reflective shaders we ship.

Are you talking about 3d buttons that are placed on the screen, and that can be moved around? it might be a little more dificult to do that… explain a little more of what the scene should look like, and I might be able to help. Reflections from dynamic scenes can be expensive to render though.

  • Peter
5

The idea is to have a dark studio setup where a set of 3d buttons appear. These buttons do indeed move (actually roate) and I want to have a reflective ground plane. The idea is to achieve somthing like:

http://www.apple.com/imac/frontrow.html

6

I would recomend mirroring the geometry, and rendering it again with a slightly darker color. If you render under the reflecting plane you want to make blend the mirrored geometry in. If your buttons can move outside the plane, you would need to mask using the stencil or some other method, that might be a little more complicated.
Another way could be to render the buttons only into a texture. You should set up the camera to render from under the plane, orthogonal to the view direction. This might only work from specific scenes though, where you are somewhat far away from the reflecting buttons.

I think the mirroring is the best choice, especially if the reflecting is only on the plane and the buttons are always over the plane.

  • Peter
7

Here is a quick reflection using render to texture. This is the first time I have tried this (and I am not experienced in this graphics stuff),so keep that in mind. I assume someone who knew what they were doing could clean it up, but as a proof of concept I think it shows what you might want to accomplish (movement being mirrored). This is the PPC binary.

9988–359–$reflectiontest_358.zip (7.89 MB)

8

Come to think of it, since you have the pro (I think I misunderstood something perhaps) you can just use the water shader with no ripples… That should give you what you want I think…

  • Peter
9

I tried the water reflection, but somehow it simply des not work right. I named the camera as needed, and it actuaally reflects, but the reflected image does not seem to refresh correctly. For example if I make a sphere over a reflective plane it starts correctly, but if I move the sphere, the plane will add the whole trajectory of the reflection, thus looking very odd. ie the reflection for the previous frames is not removed, but added! Am I missing something?

Thanks!

Alejandro

10

It seems to work pretty well here…

What is the “clear flags” set to on the camera that renderes the reflection? It should be set to solid color I guess, it sounds like it is set to dont clear.
That should clear the render texture so it does not accumulate each frame.

  • Peter
11

Thanks. will try!

12

Did you drag in the water prefab?

There is a lot more to setup than just attaching the water material to a plane. So i is best to just drag the water prefab in and modify the material from there to not have any ripples.

13

Worked like a charm :wink:

14

So far so good.

http://www.zerofractal.com/fractalreality/menu-test-camino.html

Now I have to make the arrows work fine and think up some good icons. What do you think?

15

It looks nice, but I thought you did not want any ripples on the water ? :slight_smile:

  • Peter
16

Once I saw the prefab I just fell for it. I will post one with icons soon.

I have a question.

I want the camera to move slightly, just subtle slow rolls (± 5 degree) and very slow movements always mantining its point of view. Is there a prefab or easy way to achieve this random slow moves?

Thanks.

17

You could just modify the position in the Update function using one of the Random class functions.

After you have moved it just use transform.LookAt to make the camera look at some target transform.

18

I can see the mip-levels switch quite clearly on the water bumpmap… You should consider setting to trilinear and aniso sampling in the texture inspector…

19

Joachim,

I implemented the look at controles an a random local position, but have no idea on hoy to damp the result of the position vector to make it really slow and smooth.

Please look at this to have a laugh. Talk about handshake!!

http://www.zerofractal.com/FractalReality/060406-menu-test.html

This is the main concept but really really slow and smooth. This is my current component :slight_smile:

//Smooth Camera shake Component - Zerofractal Studio
var Radius = 0.25;

function Update () {
	transform.localPosition = Random.insideUnitSphere * Radius;
}
20

Try smoothing it. (Note i haven’t actually tried this)

//Smooth Camera shake Component - Zerofractal Studio 
var Radius = 0.25; 
var smooth = 1.0;
function Update () { 
   transform.localPosition = Vector3.Lerp(transform.localPosition, Random.insideUnitSphere * Radius, Time.deltaTime * smooth); 
}