Hi all,
I keep getting this flickering issue when I add a small reflection capture sphere to a part of my scene. I’ve tried deleting the skylight and the reflection capture, then rebuilt the lighting and added the sklight and captures again but I still get the same flickering issue.
Is it more likely to be material related? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
–bump–
Needs more information to be capable of helping. Get a screenshot of the reflection capture’s settings, and also one of the object’s settings in the scene (the table or one of the helmets).
From looking at it, I think it probably is an effect of sphere reflection capture’s interaction with an aspect of the lighting rather than the materials. That’s because it’s affecting various surfaces, but only in pieces. For instance, only a narrow portion of the ground near the table is having the flicker, and the same for the other objects / actors that are affected. Did you enable ray tracing for all objects and in project settings (it’s called “Visible in Ray Tracing” if weren’t sure what I’m referring to)?
One more thought: try building the lighting after adding the reflection capture to the scene.
Hi preston42382, thanks for your reply. I’ve attached screenshots of the SphereReflectionCapture settings as well as the settings from the helmet within the scene.
I’ve tried turning off the sky light and I can still see the flicker slightly. Ray Tracing is enabled within the Project Settings. I’ve also tried rebuilding the lighting after adding the reflection capture but this doesn’t seem to make a difference.
It looks as though it’s only occuring with the metalic/reflecting surfaces on the objects.
The flicker is also occurring on shadowed parts of the objects it is affecting. So it appears to primarily affect parts that are either the darkest areas, or the lightest areas, of the objects in question. All those objects are static, right? If any of those aren’t static, it may affect how the skylight’s lighting is stored in the objects. They must be either static or stationary for a static skylight. If the skylight is dynamic (movable), then it doesn’t precompute any lighting data as baked lighting does, allowing the objects to be set to static, stationary, or movable.
I created a translucent glass material from a tutorial, and when I applied it to several meshes in the 3rd person shooter template (the platforms), adjacent platforms that had solid surfaces had flickering. It was flickering where a solid surface was adjacent to a translucent glass surface. I think it is likely a lighting issue in your case. The problem still exists when the skylight is turned off, so it’s probably another aspect of lighting that’s generating incorrect lighting data or has a bias in calculating brighter & darker areas of those surfaces of the objects. Are you using mesh distance fields? If so, try turning it off or on depending on how it’s currently set. Then try narrowing it down from there. Mesh distance fields generate meshes around objects to calculate lighting and shadowing, so it could be the sphere reflection capture is reprojecting light onto those parts of the objects, causing something like a continuous bouncing of light…or an unsolved calculation.
You could also try Environment Reflection. It’s not limited to static only.
Is there an update on whether you solved the problem? If so, what was it?
Hi Preston,
Sorry for the slow reply. I’ve tried what you mentioned above as well as looked various other settings/lights. The problem still persists 
Unsure if there may be a certain sequence in which I should be updating/building the lighting?
Well, according to documentation, reflection capture probes (sphere and box) need to be updated after they’re moved. There’s also the skylight and its Recapture button in the details for it, which if it’s changed the button should be clicked to recapture the cubemap image. I’ve read that overlapping sphere reflection captures can cause artifacts, and probes with too large of a radius could be a source of lighting issues too…though how large and if it applies here, I don’t know. One more aspect that can be checked is using a Visualization called “Pixels Out of Bounds” under Show button in the viewport. It shows whether the bounds of any objects are smaller than the geometry of the objects, which would mean the pixels are outside of its bounds and lighting and such doesn’t get calculated correctly for those. It can also be the case if a light’s bounds are smaller than its influence or source radius. Checking the skylight, and any non-directional lights would probably be the best use-case for the visualization because those have a source radius. Direction lights project light everywhere, so I’m not sure if it has a bounding box or if the bounding box can be changed to encompass its entirety of light influence. All can do is try it, and look at the details / settings for it.
What’s the resolution of those affected objects? and what’s the resolution of the lights in the area?
Try changing the capture probe’s brightness to its default (click undo arrow next to the number field). Also set its influence radius smaller, around 8000 at the maximum. Then change the helmet’s and other objects’ resolutions to 128 or 256 to start, higher if it doesn’t do anything…but not higher than 1024. Is it a mobile or non-mobile game, or both?
