Li : Dev Actionscript Development Blog

Reflective Plane

I've had a chance these days to revive one of my old topics: reflections. A while back I ran some experiments based on zupko's (PV) raycasting method, but ran into some trouble when attempting to properly render the stuff on the plane's material. This time the approach has been a bit different: A secondary virtual camera is set up as a reflection of the main camera, and its view is then projected -deperspectived- into the plane's material. The advantage of this method is that the engine will take care of all the rendering trouble for us, and furthermore, a lot of the plane's behavior can be controlled considering its nature; it is nothing more than a secondary view.

I've made sure the class (ReflectivePlane.as) has a lot of parameters to tweak the look and feel of the reflection images such as alpha, blur, distortion -as seen in the above demo- but also many other values such as reflection quality, coloration, etc. The plane can have any size, position and orientation, so the class should be pretty handy for multiple tasks. View source is enabled, so right click on the demo to see how to use this, its really simple!

Its worth mentioning that this class is simply intended to provide a basic feature and should be subject to changes, specially optimizations, but more in depth developments in reflective materials in Away3D should be taking place in the future. I certainly hope we can soon play with non-planar reflective materials, that is, materials that reflect their surroundings no matter how complex the geometry of the object they are applied to is. I'd love that... But anyway, enjoy this little class on the mean time!

Oh, and you can tweak more of the plane's parameters in this other demo.