Smart Planar Reflector

A simple-to-use and performant 3D planar reflector Godot plugin that provides crystal-clear reflections in complex environments.

Installation

1. (RECOMMENDED) Install "Smart Planar Reflector" through the Asset Library from the Godot Engine. LINK
2. (alternative) OR: Clone this repository and copy the addon/smart_planar_reflector folder into your project's addons folder
3. enable the addon from Project -> Plugins.

Demo

Watch the Video demo of this plugin here: YouTube

A simple demo scene is in the DEMO folder that demonstrates the basic usage of this addon.
Please see ACEDIA (source code) for a full, production-level demonstration of the capabilities of this addon.

Usage

THIS ADDON ONLY WORKS IN SPECIFIC CONFIGURATIONS. PLEASE READ BELOW ON HOW TO USE IT.\

1. Add a planar reflector to your scene by searching for PlanarReflector in the Add Node dialog.
2. Assign a Godot quad primitive to the mesh section of your planar reflector. Then, in the properties of that quad, change the size to how large you want your reflection surface to be.
3. From the Internal/ folder of the addon, create a material using the provided reflection shader. This shader is a VisualShader and you may tweak it to fit your project.
4. Assign the material to the Material Override 0 slot.
5. Ensure the material is unique for each reflector. This is useful when you want multiple meshes in the general area to be all reflective without additional performance cost, but do not reuse reflection materials between reflctors.
6. Enter the NodePath (recommended to be unique!) of your camera into the reflector parameter by right clicking the slot and selecting edit. Alternatively, you may use the camera override attribute.
7. For performance, planar reflectors are DISABLED by default. You may attach the public_enable_mirror() function to the ready() signal to enable it at startup, or you may, for example, only enable it when the player walks into a trigger.
8. public_ methods are free for you to use to enable, temporaily disable, or free the mirror using signals or code.

How It Works

Smart Planar Reflector (SPR) is a perspective camera-based planar reflection system. It works by creating a camera during runtime that captures what it would look like from the other side of the reflection surface.
Unlike other planar reflectors, SPR has a "dynamic near plane" system that will try its best to cull out anything that's behind the reflection surface from its camera, so that there would be less obstruction artifacts. However in some cases this is not perfect (especially when there are objects directly behind the reflection surface), so SPR also provides culling masks. This can effectively prevent obstruction issues in most environments.
Hopefully this won't be needed when "oblique" camera type gets added to Godot.

Optimization

Smart Planar Reflector (SPR) works by using an additional camera (created at runtime) to capture what would the player see from the other side of your reflector.
This type of reflection, while very versatile, easy-to-setup, and very accurate, has a non-negligable performance cost to your game (render time, VRAM allocation).
SPR provides many systems to help you minimize this performance cost so that it would not dramatically affect the performance of your game.
As a general rule, try to make it so that the player would not have more than 2 planar reflectors in view at the same time.

Donation

If you find this plugin useful, consider donating by purchasing my game on itch.io: ACEDIA