Coming Back with a test, prerendered ShadowMaps.

Hi, it´s been a long time without being here.

I´m working in a test using Cycles to bake shadowmaps. This is with intention to do a workaround to lightmass baking since I think that it´s more flexible because it allows to do per object rendering.

Another motivation is that it also allows to do baking using gpu acceleration. Though I´m not having much better results than using cpu for baking, lighting preview in Blender´s viewport using gpu worth it.

The plan is to adjust lighting in a white model using Blender, bake shadowmaps, then shading and render using unreal, no lightmass.

Now, I think that step 1 can work using shadowmaps inside unreal multplying the diffuse maps.

Then trying to do some convincent shading I´m messing it up with reflections. I don´t know if my techniques are outdated, I´m using sphere reflection captures but I´m not having good results.

(model from Blendswap´s DragonautX)

I would like to see i.e. the chairs reflected on the ground or the orange panel reflected on the desk surface.

I think that UE has strong shading capabilities but I´m out of shape. I would really appreciate some feedback, guidelines and thougths to go ahead with the test.

Adding a screenshot of the “white model” with baked shadowmaps.

I think some people have done it with Vray but it didn’t end up looking very good.

Is your 1st picture actually an unreal scene with the externally baked lightmaps or it’s what you want to achieve?

You’re still gonna need to use lightmass because the sphere reflection capture has to bake the reflections though…

Yep, the 1st one is how it´s looking into Unreal.

Yes? that´s the way it works? I thought that spheres work using just the “update reflections” button, actually I´m having some effect from them without using precomputed lighting inside Unreal. Do I need to use the full lightmass calculation to get better results from spheres? I think that what lightmass photons will do is to add some color to the bounced light (diffuse reflections), I´m not sure if it has to do something with specular reflections.

You might be right, I forgot about the update button. By default the sphere capture reflections have a 128x128 resolution. In project settings, under rendering, you can raise it up to 1024x1024. It’s quite a difference.

Just to be sure… have you set your meshes and lights to movable or static? I think if they’re movable the spheres cannot capture movable objects and movable lights…

Yep, increasing resolution is good, I have allready tried that, but what is worrying me is distortion. Thanks anyway for the tip.

Meshes are static and stationary lights. I have tried other setups but nope…

Using the screen space reflection max roughness in the post process volume helps a lot with the kind of distortion that i was talking about but it make the things worse with res, mmm…

I´m having a lot of crashes and freezes with the last build, it´s just me?

The preview build or 4.14.3?

Build 4.14.3.

Hey, that´s much better, planar reflections seems to work pretty well, a shame that they won´t work with fov.

(I know the scene is not looking good)

Without being designed to support lightmaps from outside of UE4 it will not be able to use stuff like that properly for things like reflection/specular and any dynamic lighting

the problem with planar reflections is that you always get a mirror-like surface… It’s like you’d have 1 cm of water on top of your floor hehe!

m… though shaders are working well with them, reflections are responding to roughnes/specular/metallic. I had to stop the test because incoming work but i´ll continue asap.

Adding picture to the last comment.

The planar reflection actor doesn’t take your material’s roughness into consideration. It was designed for water, mirrors, glass, etc. It’s gonna be 100% reflective. If you have a ultra polished concrete floor it can work but other than that it won’t look good.

It does.

It does seem to do something with the materials roughness, but it’s not accurate at all. Normally, the rougher a surface is, the more spread-out or blurred the reflection will look.
In your case it just looks like the overlaying reflections have their opacity lowered

Yes, you are right it should be blurring it.

Nice experiment,. But u could render out animations from blender’s viewport with the baked lighting. No need to render every frame with cycles. Is there a reason you are using ue4? For VR or walkthroughs?
Looked up how to turn on planar reflections-

I read this but I couldn’t find the Support global clip plane for Planar Reflections in the optimization section as mentioned in the documentation.
Turns out it has been moved to the Edit > Project Settings> Rendering> Lighting section
They should update this in the docs. Just wanted to leave this here in case someone can’t find the option using 4.14

planar reflections is exactly what he’s using and this is the result he gets…