I have one question. Is there any way to make realistic reflections like on this video(Hl2):
As you can see, as I move around, reflections are updating and have pretty good quality(resolution and such). More over, they work pretty fast(You can see SSR updates slowly as u move on a slow video cards). They also reflect dynamic objects and other stuff.
Because all I have now, that blurry and noisy Screen Space Reflections, that disappear near viewport border, and Cubemaps, wich gives us reflection move effect and have nothing to do with actual reflections actually. I also know about Screen Capture, but they also work from one point and moves with the player.
So, how can I make something like that?
I know, there are another shaders and stuff in Half-Life 2, but cmon… Unreal Engine 4 one of the most powerful engines and is not able to give us realistic reflections?
afaik HL2 didn’t have SSR as it was direct forward rendering.
You can increase SSR quality to the extreme using a console var (search the forums).
Old udk had this feature but it’s been dropped in favor of the new SSR+spherical. You can try with a cube reflection actor or by dropping a screen capture linked to a static camera.
Otherwise I’m afraid there’s no drop in easy solutions now.
For flat reflective surfaces like water or mirrors or reflective floors there used to be a 2D reflection capture actor in UE3, which they will probably add in UE4 once they get the chance, it just takes some more work.
Until then, SSR actually does a pretty good job for that type of thing, not for mirrors since they can’t reflect what isn’t rendered, but for floors it does pretty well.
That’s pretty good job in my book if you consider what the technique is doing. You need to balance the spherical capture and bring them down to the same level of your SSR to make them blend nicely at the edges of the screen.
Also please focus on your use case, as I doubt your game will be made of white boxes in a dark pool. There’s no one click solution, so you need to verify how that material works in context.
If not, there are a couple examples of water surfaces in the forum that can help you.
Daniel Wright (Sr. Graphics Programmer) mentioned this on a Twitch stream last October. Sounds like it’s in the works, but it won’t get done until he has some free time or someone else decides to pick it up. Since then it seems like he’s been mostly working on the distance field GI (judging by his Github commits), and his thread about it sounds like he still has a lot of work he wants to do. No telling when the planar reflections will get any attention.
You seem to forget that the method of rendering changed drastically in the past few years, PBR and deferred rendering changed the rules of the game. Many old engines were able to provide 1:1 reflections, old engines like UE1.5 for example.
You need to view everything in context otherwise it’s easy to put shame on something. Unity 5 also needs reflection probes, which work better in real-time than UE4’s reflection captures, but this is due to their GI solution or better said to their licensed GI solution (Enlighten).
