Hello everyone,
I’m working on a scene in Unreal Engine 5 that involves a large number of reflective panels arranged in concentric circles. These panels are part of a solar power plant and have an animation tilt, imported as a geometry cache from Blender. I’ve created a mirror material to apply to these panels and now I need to achieve precise reflections.
From what I’ve seen, it seems that using Planar Reflections is the way to go. However, I’m unsure about the best approach to apply these reflections to all 150 animated panels without significant performance issues.
Should I use a separate Planar Reflection for each mirror mesh, or is there a more efficient method? Additionally, how can I handle the fact that these panels are animated?
Any advice or examples on how to set this up efficiently would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
well, hello there.
i think to get “accurate” reflections on this you would need raytracing. the closest you can get without rtx is distance field/voxel reflections just using the default lumen reflection method without planar reflections or anything.
to get more out of it you can use some cvars. and gotta be on epic reflection quality.
r.Lumen.TraceMeshSDFs.Allow 1 to allow mesh distance fields. they have better resolution then the global field.
r.Lumen.TraceMeshSDFs.TraceDistance 1000 set the distance how far they are visible in the reflection.
it’s not the most detailed method in terms of texture quality but you get accurate perspective without re-rendering the scene 150 times.
There is no way to put that many planar reflections in a scene with acceptable performance. Even one planar reflection can be too costly for some scenes.
Either use raytracing/lumen, or fake the reflections.