Planar reflections and lights

[david.todd_]

We have a single projected light attached to the front of each traffic vehicle.

When projected lights are viewed from a planar reflection the emitter shape is visible.

Is there any way to disable this shape from being visible?

The attached image shows a view from the mirror and from outside the vehicle looking back.

Thanks.

[silent]

Hi David,

If you re not using shadows from the light source in that case you can easily add 2 lights in the correct headlight positions. It would not affect the performance that much due to deferred rendering.

I'm afraid there is no option to disable glare from the reflective surface, sorry.

[david.todd_]

The problem goes further than performance as when the projected lights are not casting shadows the glares are not occluded by geometry (see attached image).

Shadow casting will not be an option for us as we are planning on having 40-80 vehicles and 4 mirrors.

Is there any option to change the reflective shader to not display glows?

[silent]

Hi David,

I've successfully reproduced this behavior on a simple scene. I'm afraid, this is expected behavior for the light source that doesn't have shadows. There are couple of workaround available:

1. Configure shadow mask correctly for all objects in scene so it will use only smallest triangles count models for the shadows;
2. For all mirrors use Alpha Blend material with no transparency and in States --> Light Passes disable the Light Proj. It will disable the lightning from the specific light type and will remove glare as well;
3. Disable specular buffer completely: Rendering -> Buffers -> Specular Light. Not recommended since it will disable all the specular highlight from all the lights.

Thanks!

 

[david.todd_]

Thanks for the options.

We have changed the mirrors to an alpha blend material which has solved that particular issue. Thankyou.

However now our convex mirrors are no longer using the normal map that was giving us the increased field of view. Is this a bug or expected behaviour?

Cheers.

 

[silent]

Hi David,

Normals are critical for the correct rendering of lightning and reflections, so it's recommended to use them always.

Thanks!