Rear view mirror?

[bungalow bill]

Is it possible to create a HUD with a rear view mirror in LE? (And preferably one that can have a shape other than just rectangular...)

[Canardia]

Yes, but it needs to be explained in the Programming Forum.

[bungalow bill]

Ok. Thanks. Sorry for posting in the wrong forum. (I'll return and ask for further directions in the appropriate place when I've gone through some tutorials.)

[Ending Credits]

Have a look at the water tutorial, it explains how to do reflections.

[Josh]

It's pretty easy to do this:

 

Create a buffer.

Render to it.

Draw the buffer's color texture on the screen.

[Canardia]

Not enough, you need to make a dummy texture and material file which you use to paint a plane, then you just replace the texture of the material on the fly with the rendered color buffer. That way the rear mirror can have any shape and it's fully 3D ingame.

[VeTaL]

Sorry for resurrecting old thread, i'm also interested in ways of real mirror creation (entity, which can be placed on the wall and show room).

I found this thread about Realtime Cubemap Reflection , so what is the best way to make a mirror?

[Richard Simpson]

This post isn't of much help but just noticed this technique while playing Test Drive Unlimited 2. They have a less detailed world rendered in the mirrors. Would this be done by decreasing the LOD distance? Anyhow, it's a pretty cool way to go around things, as you don't tend to notice much of a difference at a quick glance, yet it will up performance by a lot. An image showing what I mean:

[VeTaL]

Great idea

I have no idea, how this can be implemented in LE 2, but nice to keep it in mind for LE 3 for Josh.

[Richard Simpson]

Hmm come to think of it, I bet it only affects vegetation. so in the second pass or something, they may lower the vegetation view distance.

[Flexman]

I used a combination of ModelDetail(n) and TerrainDetail(n) when rendering second cameras for TV monitors. You can also use a filter (RenderWorld(...)) and reduce the camera range of your mirror cam to speed things up.

 

I've done it for a weapons camera, if you don't go overboard with real-time shadows (I recommend turning them off for a mirror camera pass) it should work really well.

 

Additional performance can be had by frame skipping the mirror cam update. Just update the texture every other frame will greatly improve overall performance.

[VeTaL]

I used a combination of ModelDetail(n) and TerrainDetail(n) when rendering second cameras for TV monitors. You can also use a filter (RenderWorld(...)) and reduce the camera range of your mirror cam to speed things up.

 

I've done it for a weapons camera, if you don't go overboard with real-time shadows (I recommend turning them off for a mirror camera pass) it should work really well.

 

Additional performance can be had by frame skipping the mirror cam update. Just update the texture every other frame will greatly improve overall performance.

 

Whoa, quite useful recommendations.

[Richard Simpson]

Oh, I forgot about camera range! Just noticed in the image also that the shadows are disabled in Test Drive Unlimited 2 in the mirrors. I never realised that before.

[MstrGhosT]

Thank you