Vertex Projected Reflections

A new implementation was required in order to achieve better looking software water. It is slightly more complicated, a little more CPU expensive but I feel the results are allot more appealing and worth it. No hardware acceleration was used so this should hopefully work on any computer.

The differences are:

Previous

• Invert the scene so that it is upside down
• Setup the clipping plane so that only vertices above the water (those that will be reflected) are drawn
• Draw the scene
• Disable the clipping plane
• Render scene as normal

Now

• Invert the scene so that it is upside down
• Setup the clipping plane so that only vertices above the water (those that will be reflected) are drawn
• Render the scene to a texture to be used when rendering the water
• Project each of the water vertices to screen coordinates. Set these values as water texture coordinates
• Render scene as normal

Further optimizations are to be added for the water. Use a terrain approach to render the water by splitting it into patches and rendering with a level of detail therefore reducing the polygons drawn in the distance. As well as reducing the number of polygons rendered I should be able equally cut the number of water vertices updated and projected to screen.

I have just looked through this blog and feel a little dubious about it. I guess the first question is does anyone read it? If so can you let me know. I am going to update it as often as required regardless because it is a nice timeline of the Decade Engine for me, however if people read it and would like to learn something from it please let me know. I can start to make the posts more technical with sample source, comparisons etc... In essence start to build up a 3D engine tutorial.