Today I noticed that certain water doesn’t reflect. At first I thought it could be water depth, but one block reflective water proved that to be untrue. Next I assumed it was the difference between still and flowing water, but soon found various examples of reflective flowing water.
Finally I discovered a place where water transitioned from unreflective to reflective, and decided to run some tests on water height;
The lowest pool is positioned at block height 63 (63 when stood in the water) and as you can see it’s reflective;
Then 64, also reflective;
…and finally, 65 - NOT reflective;
It’s also worth noting that 64 is quarter of the 256 build height.
That’s just information for players, but I have a question for the developers - are there technical reasons for this detail, and would it ever be possible to raise the reflection height? If it has performance implications then I completely understand, I’m just curious is all.
@james @luke-turbulenz @vdragon
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But water becomes reflective again at some point above 65? Any idea where?
Yes!!! Thank you for checking into this. I’ve been wanting a reflective pool but only if it actually reflects.
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At the moment there is only one reflection plane at ‘sea level’ which is typically 64m in most worlds. For the reflection we use a ‘proper’ reflection where the scene is rendered again from another reflection camera to a texture that is then used on the water. We did experiment with some logic to detect other heights but the heuristics we tried were not really good enough at the time, e.g. if you have a large water plane in the background (the sea) and a near by pool only one of the two can be chosen. Rendering the scene for each unique plane is expensive so we did not go that route. An alternative is screen space reflections which many games use (as they are comparatively cheap) but these wont give the same mirror like reflections as they only reflect whats is visible on screen rather than what should be reflected and tend to have issues near the edge of the screen.
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Thanks for the information @michaelb. I take it the screen space reflections weren’t preferable to what we have now then? I do love the current reflections, though I’d personally like waterfalls to reflect also - would something like this be possible with SSR?
Would it be possible to marry the two systems together for where the current system isn’t viable - or is too expensive to use?
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Sorry @AzureHelios, I skipped your post.
They do? Do you have any screenshots or co-ordinates I can check out? From what @michaelb is saying, there’s a certain level where reflections are rendered.
@Pseudonym84 I’m posing a couple of questions. Not making any statements there, sorry for the confusion.
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