Back in 2016, I faked a mirror in SL with photographic post processing trickery. It didn’t look that great, but at the time, there were no real mirrors in any virtual world (or any video game) as far as I knew. Now SL has real time, dynamic mirrors!
Currently, mirrors are only supported in the official SL viewer, however, as I compile Firestorm for myself, and the “Materials Featurette” release was just merged into Firestorm’s source code repository, here’s a first look from the upcoming Firestorm!
As you can see, while impressive (it’s even more impressive when you see it update in real time!), it’s still not perfect. There are obvious “bevel” effects around the edges. Before I blame FS/SL for this too much, I must note that this is the first mirror I’ve created and I understand that there might be some level of fiddling with the reflection probe to get it to look just right.
But never mind the imperfections, it’s here, and it’s amazing 🙂
Update: Resizing the reflection probe eliminated the bevel effect.
So yes, play around with these to get the hang of them. Also do realize that mirrors are expensive in terms of performance. I run frame limited at 75 FPS (which I hit all the time in the upcoming FS) and switching Mirror Resolution to 2048 in graphics preferences dropped my framerate to 17 FPS.