How to have a HighRes Reflection of my HDRI ?

Development Rendering
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1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently making a movie and I decided (for multiple reasons) to do it entirely on Unreal Engine.
My problem is on a specific scene where my character is walking in an environment like the Salar De Uyuni
ref here : https://images.rove.me/w_1920,q_85/xzw4pax2k3jahx4hagfh/bolivia-salt-flats-or-salar-de-uyuni.jpg

My problem is that I tried With Raytracing, Lumen, Planar reflection, Sphere capture or whatever I just can’t have a result where the reflection of my HDRI is not that pixelated. (UE4.26 & UE5)
The only solution I found is to have my HDRI setted up with a 200 radius which causes me a hell lot of other problem in term of animation of my film. because the size of the entire scene became way too small.
I do not care at all about optimization since it’s not a game. I tried to push resolution of maps, reflection and everything else to the maximum but it just won’t work.
Everything else is find actually but just for this scene I just can’t have a good result.

I’m really desperate :frowning: any help, or trick would be very appreciated.

344732-salar.jpg
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The best “result” I had is this one but it’s just a viewport preview of a planar reflection which disapear when I hit render (i know its normal because it works like this but still… I’m sad).

344733-salar2.jpg
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2

It’s basically a sky dome, but why not map it onto a sphere, then you get the top duplicated on the bottom?

3

What I’m saying is, don’t use a reflection. If you have the same texture mapped to the top and bottom of the sphere, that’s job done, no?

I just got an hdr from hdr haven, and you can copy the top half into the bottom half:

344723-screenshot-2.jpg
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The rest of your workflow is the same.

4

Ah, you didn’t say that before… :wink:

That part, you’ll need to do in another way, perhaps planar, perhaps SSR, not quite sure…

5

Well, when I simply put it on a plane (or a sphere or whatever), the reflection on the ground is still hardly pixelated when it get to a certain distance. So I don’t see how an other object to have my HDRI image will change anything (or don’t really know how to do it), I think the problem is just on the resolution of the reflection actually :confused:

(I’m still new to Unreal so I don’t fully aknowledge the limitation of it)

6

Ah ! Yes indeed I can do that but how do I manage to have the reflection of my character and all the assets that will populate the scene after that ? (yeah I know my scene is still empty for now)