Way back in January, I saw a fantastic tutorial by Graphic Dix for Modavia Fashion Marketing on using Second Life’s water in an innovative way to capture reflections. We’ve all stood on the bank of a river or waded into the ocean and admired our reflections, but he took it to a new level.

I wanted to do something similar and experimented a little bit and ended up going in a slightly different and, perhaps, easier direction, though achieving the same effect.  I began by finding a texture, in this case some mossy pavers from Zooboing Creations. I made a copy of the texture and using a big soft-edge eraser, I erased part of it, leaving it open alpha areas.

I made two very thin prims for my floor and covered them with a transparent texture from the library. Then I put the original texture on the upward facing face of the bottom prim and the puddled texture on the upward facing face of the upper prim and placed the prims just below and at the water’s surface. The two prims are very close together, but they leave just a bit of gap and they allow you to see the bottom of the puddle while it still reflects the images of you and everything around it. I made sure that my graphics were set so that water reflected everything and snapped away.

I did the same thing using a texture from Saroman at OpenGameArt.org, creating wet streets for a city scene.

After that it was pretty easy to toss together a box with a floor on the water and shoot a few pictures. To get a good reflection, I used the Mirror windlight that I will show you in the next tutorial.

You can try these out for yourself at the Blogger Carnival at SL9B which opens on Monday. Gidge and I invited a bunch of friends to contribute tutorials on photography and blogging and there will be several sets available for you to try out the new skills you learn.

Store info at Blogging Second Life

****SHOPPING LIST******

• Poses: Status
• Skin: Izzie’s – Delusional Skin pale RB CL
• Makeup Tattoos: Izzie’s – Delusional Eyeshadow lemon
• Izzie’s – Lipstick peach
• Eyes: IKON ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Hazel (M)
• Lashes: [LeLutka]-2011 lashes/curl/touch me
• Mani/Pedi: Hand size 20 (L)/NAIL/female[MANDALA]medium
• Hair: ::Exile:: Magda:Cayenne
• Clothing: Baiastice_Zoroaide Mesh Maxi Dress-Multi-sungold-size M
• Shoes: Gaeiine *GA* Flat Bare Feet
• Jewelry: (Kunglers Extra) Masai – copper
• Location:  Blogger Carnival at SL9B