Hi,
It seems like DFAO doesn’t work with VR. I have checked with 4.14 and 4.15. Just a fresh project, DFAO switched on, VR preview.
Hey ,
So I ran a test on my end and can confirm that DFAO is not working on VR. However, I do not believe this to be a bug as using DFAO requires a Movable Skylight cast dynamic shadows set to true. This kinda goes against the VR best practices where we encourage users to use static lighting as often as possible, and as few dynamic lights as possible.
This is done to keep in line with the performance requirements when making any VR experience. Using a Movable Skylight is going to immediately have a performance cost, and having to leverage that with your other VR content would be difficult as Skylights cast shadows on the entire scene. If you would like to use AO there are a few other methods which can work really well for you in this case.
For starters you can use the Lightmass baked AO term, which can be found and enabled through the World Settings tab. You can also take a look at the Precomputed AO Mask to have more control over how the AO will look on a per material basis.
Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.
Thank you,
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the reply. I know the best practices very well and agree that for average hard surface environments those should be used if possible. On the other hand I really strongly disagree on that “best practices” is a valid reason to limit certain tools. It’s up to the user to decide if they are happy to pay the high price for using it. Not everyone is making Robo recall or VR arch-viz. There could be numerous creative use cases for DFAO with VR. So unless there are technical limitations to implement it, I can only call this a bug.
Regards,
Fisher
Hey ,
You make a fair point, so I have gone ahead and entered the bug report to have this issue addressed.
Once the issue has been addressed by our engineers the ticket will be updated and reflected in the public tracker. Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.
Cheers,
Thanks Andrew!
The report has been updated to reflect the future of DFAO in VR.
I agree with you completely as well. I’d love this ability as well. I’ve found if I’m working on a really small or focus project that I can break a lot of the “VR best practices” that a full game can’t.
Visualizing a few things really well in VR is still a need of a lot of non-game users.
I added another vote for this. My project would be better served with distance field lighting in the deferred renderer than using the suggested forward rendering pipeline.
Are there any news to this topic? I really need DFAO in VR too. My current projects are looking really bad without DFAO in VR…
Yeah, you can ready it in the bugreport above. They won’t fix it unfortunately, so make sure to vote on it, maybe it reaches the needed pressure.
I have voted for it. 
But I have no understanding for Epic’s decision not to fix it. Perhaps we can change their opinion.
It has been 6 months ago. Any update on this matter maybe? I had quite a few projects that really missed this feature. Makes me really sad that it’s there, working perfectly but we can’t use it just because of “vr”.
Thanks,
Fisher
I also have no sympathy for the fact that Epic does not support DFAO in VR. Even if it can lead to performance problems, it should be left to everyone to decide whether to use this technology or not. DFAO is currently the most important feature that needs to be integrated into VR. It would dramatically increase the visual quality.
Unfortunately there are no good news regarding this topic. I cannot understand why it is so difficult to implement DFAO into VR… Screenspace Reflections and normal AO is working in VR… And this can also lead to performance problems.
Please add support for DFAO in VR. If it’s just to protect performance what is the point? There are tonnes of other engine features that murder VR performance. Besides, hardware has come a long way in the last few years!