In this camera test, I still see the sun’s reflection in the water despite that the sun should be casting the shadow from the landscape, blocking any of that light. I’ve tried a Planar Reflector actor–the preview look correctly blocks the sun, but at Play it reverts back to what you’re seeing here.
I’m using the Water material that comes with Unreal’s Water plugin, and I think I’m reading elsewhere that the Planar Reflector actor only works with “reflective” materials. Would this water material need anything more than turning the roughness all the way down? Something with changing the material mode in the MM?
Building this scene, I’ve been using Joe Garth’s Brushify.IO tool set. It comes with his own Ocean material, and this material does work as expected as seen in the screenshot. It ultimately doesn’t have the lovely look of the Unreal Water Plugin material, but it does offer the correct sun reflection. Strange.
If anyone comes by this post with this question, I found a solution and seems to work great.
Crank up the Dynamic Shadow Distance MovableLight value. The slider max’s out at 20000 but you can type in 100,000 or more and that gives me the effect.
The Cascaded Shadow Map distance is limited for a reason, it has finite resolution that is based on the area it has to cover and its performance is impacted by everything it needs to render. Which means the quality and performance both get worse as the shadow distance increases.
This may not be noticeable if there’s nothing in your scene but a landscape but it will be very obvious as you start populating it.
The better way to solve this is to use the Far Cascade. Landscapes are automatically set to render into the far cascade by default, all you need to do to enable them is set the far cascade count to 1 or higher in your directional light.
