How to Photograph Photoshop-Free SL Water Reflections

Yes, this puddle-filled picture above by Graphic Dix was made in Second Life, and no, the final image hasn't been post-processed in Photoshop or suchlike. Click here for the embiggenized version. Now that you're duly impressed, click here for a detailed, illustrated, step-by-step tutorial on how that's done.

Mr. Dix, by the way, a designer from near Milan, also makes beautifully post-processed SL-based images, and shows you how to do so here.

Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

He uses an intense process to place an alpha layer over the surface of the water to vary transparencies between stones and water.

Rich reflections for the water are possible in viewer 3 and TPVs based on it (were they in older viewers?) - which is also a part of this process.

So lots of pre-processing, but no post processing.

I've got some screenshots on my computer that show that you can get -almost- this good without either pre or post processing.

And running with water reflections on full seems to not be too processor intensive.

[Frans Charming]

To bad we can't have a water layer or some such of varying dimensions and height. So you can have reflections in rain puddles on top of roofs, and have different elevations in your streets.

[John Branch]

I hate to be a grouse about something done with so much care, but the picture just seems problematic to me. My first question (and the only one I'll bother with): Why would a man in a light rain stop in the middle of a puddle and stand there?

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

I love that photo. It stopped me in my tracks.

It shows us what so many of us don't have, or chose not to have.

Too bad we (Americans at least) cannot have more such wistful places in our real lives.

We settle for being packed into expensive metal cans painted in shiny colors, so we can rocket through suburban asteroid belts of banal shopping and vinyl-and-chipboard "homes," places that cannot be loved, where you get your coffee in a paper cup from a Starbucks like 1000 others, where no one stops to look at the rain, where it's suicide to walk the dog, other than 'round the aptly named cul-de-sac.

And we call it "freedom."

[foneco zuzu]

A post that makes All Us wonder why We spent so much of our times pointing the bad and forget about just enjoying the good.
What a remarkable World SL is and how often we forget it!

[Pussycat Catnap]

"Why would a man in a light rain stop in the middle of a puddle and stand there?"

I dunno. But who hasn't done that?

[Pussycat Catnap]

"To bad we can't have a water layer or some such of varying dimensions and height."

Great idea for a JIRA btw.

Water in SL appears to be a surface layer combined with an alteration of lighting below that layer.

I would imagine this could be done with a filter on any prim.

In fact, a JIRA to support filter textures would be ideal - where the light one one side comes out different that the other. But without directional lighting in SL, this would have be limited to something like 'the light inside the object'...

(and why don't we have directional lighting... almost daily of late I've wanted to rez a conical spot light...

[Eyeball Soup]

We do have them. They're called projectors.