Reflective Surfaces

Unfortunately, this post will not be too interesting. Although water looks super awesome in games, it was much easier to implement than those damn shadows (which look easier to implement).

How it works

To implement reflective surfaces, you just need to render the scene from underneath and above the surface and use projective texturing to blend the two images together onto that surface.

Reflective surfaces (and refractive surfaces) - Water

Implementing reflective surfaces (or just water) was very simple which was something I wasn’t expecting when implementing it.

This was mostly due to the fact that I had already worked with shadows which used framebuffers (the new concept for me).

For this, I used this video