Revisiting screen-space and planar reflections

Reflections are a very important visual effect that we can see in many places around us: in mirrors, puddles, glasses, and all sorts of other materials. Their importance has impacted the development of real-time rendering engines, which have tried to replicate this natural phenomenon in multiple ways.

We learned about the latest cutting-edge solution in the previous recipe when looking at software and hardware ray tracing. However, as realistic as that approach is, we have to keep in mind that not all devices support that technique. It is in those circumstances that we need to fall back to cheaper, more traditional solutions. Legacy techniques such as screen-space and planar reflections work on systems that lack the hardware needed to enable real-time ray tracing. Let’s look at how to enable them next.

Getting ready

All you’ll need this time around is a simple scene that contains an object where it makes sense to...