Reflect nodes in GR2
 

Good day all,

While working with uboat gr2s, seeing an interestin node: Reflect.

My question is: what does it do? I don't see anything attached to it, nothing in .sim/.zon/.val files seems to have any controllers on it - so what is its purpose?

Any idea?

Have you tried merging the Fx file in Goblin?

I actually found one controller that attached to that in .sim: WaterReflections...

and that is the only one.

But what do the WaterReflections do? Can't seem to actually find the use for it exactly

I think what it says. If I remember correctly caustics controller is located in the sim file and it is also previewed in Goblin. Try removing the discussed node/controller and see if anything changes in the rendered preview :hmm2:

Did. The caustic creates the visual water reflection/stains on the hull/deck. It also on the main hull node, not on reflection one.

Removing WaterReflections controlled: can't seem to find what exactly changes.

Is there a similar controller in the AI surface units? Maybe it is the same controller making ships detectable at long range from their reflection on water surface :hmmm:

Will have to play around with this more. Not that I care, but if I don't need the mesh - why would I edit it for an AI IXb, right?

So the node has a mesh attached to it? Is it a low def copy of the hull by any chance?
If it is there, it got to do something (if it was a dat unit I would suspect that it was a SHIV leftover, but not in this case. I suggest you to leave as last work anyway :salute:

yeah, very rough one. But there is also a dbg model, which is also a hull-shape-low poly...

Well, in this case I am almost sure that it is used for hull reflection effectt on water surface :up:

probably also the cause of spotting ships via their reflections through fog, lol :har:

If memory serves me well, that controller got some lod distance settings. Either they don't work correctly, or we need to finetune them :know:

It does the ship reflections on the water. It will have a mesh attached to it (usually a low-res version). I changed those to the actual mesh of the item in SH3 to have better reflections.

Hmm. I might try that as well to see if it will be a much more painfull load on the system running the game in case of SH5. If not - it will allow me to eliminate this mesh out of gr2 and just re-assign the water reflections to the actual mesh instead.