I noticed that chrome objects with a low roughness become very washed out when the camera moves away from them. Small details start melting into the larger geo which I suppose is because of the approximation of Lumen.
I tried every setting and a lot of console commands to improve the quality - also followed a tutorial from William Faucher where he mentions the setting “Hit Lighting for Reflection”… - also tried different distance field resolution scales…
I was wondering if there is any way to to a distance blend to screen space or spherical reflections to maintain the sharpness/details in the geometry.
If not - is there any important setting I did not find yet?
I actually have a very similar issue going on with a brushed metal(anisotropic) material that I was testing. I’ve played with a million settings, none have worked. I don’t have hardware raytracing on this PC.
In this image, the left is with GI set to lumen, the right is set to none:
Here is the material in the editor, working correctly in the editor. The tangent material is a typical RG texture that I’ve used to test out plenty of anisotropic materials in the past:
Rougher surfaces worked for me but since you are using normal maps, it could be caused by the mesh distance fields and surface cache. So far my best guess was that lumens approximation causes washed out surface/normals - but I am really just guessing…
I’m just using the default normals of the mesh. The tangent slot is for skewing the anisotropic part of the material. I’ve checked the mesh distance fields and tested it on other geometry as well, no dice. I’ve checked a ton of lumen things like the cards and such, still no dice.
My guess is you’re right and that there’s some approximating going on when some value is below some threshold. Looks like it drops to a simpler algorithm or something.
Here’s a screenshot of that same material on a cube in the level. Looks like the math involves the dot product of the light source, which makes sense. The top is still working if you look carefully:
EDIT:
I guess it does help to have some kind of normal map to go along with it. Here’s what happens when I throw in a fake normal map to it (just reusing the anisotropic map +1 in the blue channel). It still doesn’t look like the back face there is doing things 100% correctly, but it at least masks some of the issue and doesn’t looks glaringly flat:
This is really odd. Could you put the cube into a level sequence and rotate it? Curious to see how it behaves.
Maybe the mesh distance fields aren’t detailed enough. Did you try to increase the local resolution?
In my case it helped a little bit, but only in close-ups. My issue could be the global distance field which is very low res, giving all details the same reflection…
If anyone knows how to increase the global distance field, please let me know. Tried all sorts of console commands and looked through all settings, but the global distance field view always stays at low res.
Another solution could be changing the blending distance between local and global. The manual says it uses local distance fields for close-ups and at 2m distance it uses the global DF. But again, no idea how to change that.
Here’s a clip of it. I show the reflection bugging, lumen overview, global distance field and mesh distance field. The top bugs in and out based on viewing angle as well. Project is set to Lumen with the default global trace, but even with detail trace, it still does this.
This cube has the material I linked in my first post. Just a gold color, 1 for metallic, 0.25 for roughness, 0.33 for anisotropy and an XY tangent map for the angles.
