Hi,
I’m a newcomer to UE4 (and game development in general). I followed along one of the official UE4 tutorials (Creating A Level) and I was having trouble understanding the Reflection Environment and Reflection Capture Actors. I read through the docs and I have a vague understanding of them but it’s still not quite clear to me. If somebody can explain it to me like I’m a dummy then it would be great. If it would require knowing a lot of additional concepts then links to resources would also be awesome, so I can read up on them and learn.
To get reflections, you just place the reflection capture actors around your level, they render something like a cubemap and then if an object is within range of a reflection actor it will blend them together to create reflections on the actor. They only render once so they won’t update what they reflect. But you can combine it with Screen Space Reflections to get very good reflections (SSR is a post effect that creates real-time reflections of anything rendered in-frame).
Hi Mutinix,
Have you taken the time to look at the Content Examples > Open Map > Reflections.umap? This will allow you to see and learn visually about all the types of reflections and how they can work in your game.
We also have some documentation that goes along with our Showcase Reflections example from the Marketplace. (link here)](Engine Feature Examples for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation)
Then we have an overview here of how reflections work and to set them up for the best results in your scene. (Link Here)](Reflections Captures in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation)
If you have any specific questions feel free to ask!
Thank you!
Tim