Fallout 4 chemistry workstation - background image used for reflections
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I've only noticed this today: when the chemical station appeared in the grey-backed loading screen, there appeared to be a transparent image used on the inside of the Florence flask (the big round one at the corner of the worktable).
I managed to capture an example in-game, but it's far easier to see in the loading screen.
Does anybody know what (or where) the image is of? Or how to find the original in the game data?
To me it looks like a 360 degree image taken on the bank of a river, of a town with white buildings and dark red roofs. It does appear to rotate as you move your character around the flask.
The image does not appear to be a reflection of the world around the character, as I took this photo in Diamond City.
So far in my own research, I have found out that the flask type is called a Florence flask (or a boiling flask). Searches on Google images for "fallout 4 chemistry station image in flask" and "fallout 4 chemistry station Florence flask background image" (and others) have not proven very useful.
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This is the default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_mapping for objects so that they 'reflect' outside scenery, hence the reason they 'follow' the player. It is the same one as used for the 'reflection' of the buggy water puddles, and objects like the scopes of guns.
I guess the reason for this being an outside scenery is that these objects are likely to be used more frequently outside.
The cubemap file is called mipblur_DefaultOutside1.dds (this .dds graphics filetype can be decompressed by the GPU [more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw_Surface ], and is therefor preferable over other graphic image files).
The file can be found in Fallout 4's Data folder, in the file Fallout4 - Textures1.ba2. This file has a folder hierarchy (similar to the loose files in the folder structure in 'Fallout 4/Data'), and the cubemaps are located in 'Textures\Shared\Cubemaps'.This is the file as opened in Photoshop:
And this is the file after some transforming, to make it look how cubemaps are supposed to look:
While the image may have elements of Concord or similar towns in the Commonwealth, it is more likely a collage of different views: if you follow the lines of the different sides of the 'cube', you can clearly see blurred edges, strange transitions, and implausible geometry (the patch of grass in the center image is a good example).
In all likelihood the different sides are different screenshots from the (early) game photoshopped together.