My 3rd entry in the weekly Shader Series is on Screen Space Reflections. It overviews the meat and potatoes of the shader along with a healthy amount of code samples.

Let me know what you think of the tutorial formats, I’d love some feedback, and give Virtex a follow to keep up with our shader series and upcoming releases.

rtroe's avatarVirtex Edge Design

Screen Space Reflections are used in every engine these days. Games from The Witcher 3 to Fortnite all employ this effect, so it was natural that we wanted it in Vertices. While I came across a lot of different examples and tutorials online, none seemed to be complete or clear enough to easily show the method, so I’ve hoped to clarify that here.

Initial Approach

The Initial approach to Reflections in Vertices was to use planar reflections. which essentially was to redraw the entire scene from the reflected position of the camera.

Initial View of Planar Reflections

While this provided a great result with very little artifacts, it was expensive as it required re-drawing the scene for each reflected surface. Enter SSR.

The Concept

Before we can create someting that immitates the real world, we need to breakdown how it behaves in the real world, which for reflections is quiet intuitive.

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