MIRROR · on the salt lake
A salt lake that mirrors the sky. The reflection uses no reflection camera and no projection matrix: the mountains and the salt shards are each built twice, once flipped down through the water. The water is semi-transparent, so the copy underneath shows through as the reflection — one geometry, two roles, with the horizon and its mirror always on the same line. The salt crust is a jittered grid, each point offset by a fixed seed and joined into segments to form the sun-cracked skin; the mountains are placed around a single ring with randomised heights and spreads. The sun sits low, and the directional light and the glow on the sky share one bearing so the halo never disagrees with the light. The water nudges its texture a little each frame — the mirror drifts too, just too slowly to notice. The crust, the mountains, the shards, the sun and the sky are all computed at runtime — no models, no textures.
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The mountains and shards are each built a second time with y negated; the water is semi-transparent, so the copy underneath shows through as the reflection. No reflection camera, no projection matrix — one geometry in two roles, and the horizon and its mirror always meet on the same line, however you drag the camera.
The whole reflection depends on the water letting the copy below show through. Push the opacity near opaque and the reflection vanishes, leaving a grey slab; push it too far and the water stops reading as water. 0.52 is the setting that keeps both, with depthWrite off so it never hides the copy below from the depth test.
Both the sun glow on the sky and the DirectionalLight take their position from sunPosition. Give them separate bearings and the halo drifts to the wrong side of the light, so the orange edge along the ridges no longer lines up with the sun.
