Polymath Snuggler The auto-probes they're using do not give accurate or any mirror reflections and do not include any static or dynamic objects. If this was the case the Linden Water would look much better. You can try this by placing a 64x64 probe over Linden Water.

Yes the water does show a reflection map of the windlight, but an actual probe provides much better and accurate shading as you can see in the snapshot attached. The bottom half is from a probe, and the top half is the default linden water.

Polymath Snuggler I must be a slow learner. What is a "sim wide sky probe"? I've been using PBR from day one and the associated probes I need to creata to go with it. Second question. If I went through the trouble to create probes for my builds, why in the heck would I switch them to none? What is the magical One Probe? Sorry to be dense, but apparently after the past couple of years I don't know how probes work.

So. The probe system is set up like this : There's one GIANT probe in the sky, that encompasses the entire region. If you turn your reflection probes to "None" and drop a mirrored sphere in the middle of your sim, you will see all land and all sky reflected in your sphere. This IS the Skyprobe, as without it, you'd see black void in your mirror-ball, everywhere... ( In the code base this sky probe is jokingly named "One Probe to Rule Them All" cause the Lindens are all nerds like me... ) As you gradually increase the level of reflection probes in your settings, it adds additional probes to the scene, including manual ones if you specify that setting, and automatic ones if you increase it to add those as well. Each of those probes samples reflections at set points that ( hopefully ) give you a more accurate reading of what the environment closer by reflects like. Probes themselves are simply points in space that look around an area from their point of view in the 3D world and store "What they See" in memory. They then use that image data to display the surrounding area as reflections. Which is to say, if you put your probe in a box, the only thing it's going to see is the interior of a box. It can't "magically see the outside of a box". ( this is why we have manual probes for buildings and rooms ) This is why other probes are needed outside the box, and also why manually relocating your "One Sim wide Prim To Rule them All" via some sort of mega-prim hackery isn't going to improve your reflection coverage ( ignoring the part where it already exists way up in the sky ). The problems with water sampling should be addressed in an upcoming viewer release when they add Screen-Space Reflections to large planar areas ( like water ).

I'm guessing the reason you get "better results" with a megaprim probe ( I honestly had no idea that even worked to be honest ) is it's effectively lowering the skyprobe to be closer to the land, which from some angles might have better coverage? The precise situation of the perceived improvement is a hypothetical guess to me. If this actually is the case, I would suggest changing this Canny-Request to a request for an Estate-Setting that allows the precise Z-Position of the Skyprobe to be set, instead of using Megaprims. I do feel obliged to point out the added caveat though, that if you lower your Sky-probe too close to the ground the chances of it getting stuck inside terrain, or foliage or inside a building increases, in which case the interior space of that location will be what is reflected across the ENTIRE region instead of the land and sky~

Polymath Snuggler Looks like the sim-wide probe doesn't include any off sim objects which is part of the problem I was seeing. Let me revise this post when I have time. It is so hard to tell what's going on with reflections since Screen Space is broken so terribly right now.

When probes are turned "Off" and the only remaining probe is the Sky probe, it does not sample objects, that is correct. I am unsure of whether it starts doing so when using higher settings, such as Auto & Manual probes.

Polymath Snuggler The problem I am having is that there are no auto-probes outside of the regions borders, so the sim surround I am using is not getting any reflections. Screen Space would be nice if it actually worked properly. Though I would love to see some maybe larger off-sim probes so the linden water can get some really nice reflections and lighting

Yeah ~ Sim Surrounds are not "officially supported content" by LindenLabs, as such they did not design the initial probe system to function reliably for that type of thing( though they were not unaware of the use-case, as there was much discussion during the Content Creation meetings on this subject~) Improvements to Screen Space reflections aren't a silver bullet in this case but hopefully they will improve things. The inherent problem here ~ is that there are no "Cheap Reflection" algorithims. At some point performance needs to be a priority over visuals.

Rental Rizzler I verified this too, all my sims / work areas get their own probes.

Rental Rizzler Also to note, it doesnt cover ground to 4000m - if you build on a platform youll want a probe up there as well.

Rental Rizzler never seen any sea reflect the way you have shown on the right.

steph Arnott I was using a mega-prim as a sphere probe, and it was giving the linden water off-sim very nice reflections with my sim surround. More problems from the giant probe though unfortunately. Ended up removing it.

Rental Rizzler, reflection sphere probes can be overlapped, cubed ones produce weird effects when overlapped due to the Z plane.

steph Arnott Sphere probes can overlap, but manually that intersect don't have any sort of algorithm to mix the reflection maps together, so you end up with two sources blended being used for reflections, and you could often see where the two sphere probes meet.

At this point I have removed the region wide probe and tweaked the regions windlight, and I am looking into replacing the linden water altogether with an animated mega-prim if I can get it looking good enough. I did a quick test and I get very nice reflections.

Rental Rizzler, good luck in your project.

steph Arnott I have found a workaround using a mega prim mirror probe (2048x2048x2). Placed .02 meters above the linden water height. This results in reflections on linden water that include everything in the region including the sim surround and avatars.

This also does not interfere with the auto-probes or manually placed probes, and does not cause shading on other intersecting prims/meshes. (Check snapshots)

There are some issues with distant meshes not being reflected at some angles, and occasional flickering, but this otherwise works.

Rental Rizzler, I hope you are not using an actual mirror and mean reflection probe.

steph Arnott This is a mirror

Its only affecting surfaces that are flat on the z-plane and within a very small distance to the z-height of the mirror probe. If you would do this with a normal sized prim it would cause the mirror to be applied to anything it touches.

Not sure why in this case its only working in a specific way, but it works for my use, and the performance impact is about 50%. I sit at around 40 FPS, and with mirrors enabled I am at 20 FPS. Mirror updates are on ultra, and set to 2048 resolution so its maxed out. I can save another 10 FPS by turning mirror updates down, but that causes a lot of jittering in mirrors at the moment.

Arduenn Schwartzman, the primary is a cover for all, majority in SL have no idea about such stuff.