Hi, I'm wondering if there's anyone who know's if it's possible to pre-compute reflection maps for window reflections in a city environment. Had it only been one single planar reflection as is the case with water, the extra rendering pass wouldn't matter. But in an urban environment there can be many planar reflective surfaces visible at once, even when all the windows in a single facade are condsidered a single surface. The reflections need not be completely accurate. Does anyone have experience of a similar situation?

In spider man, they just used a cube map reflection.

It would just reflect the sky and a background picture of a city, it looked really good unless you got up close and noticed it wasn't reflecting the building across the street!

OK :) Thanks! I'll start testing this out. The tough part will be the generation of these cube maps, as I'd like to do this in 3ds max. But maybe it's not that difficult to write a max script that accomplishes this. Another thought I had was to generate a cube environment map for points along the streets, every so many meters, and then blend the results of texture lookups to the two closest such points, using the inverse distances as weights. But then, this would probably just lead to an undistinguishable reflection. The way to go is probably to do as you say, generate a cube map for every entity (building).