As you can see in the video the material gets colored white (lighting) instead of reflecting the door if I look down. Is this a visual glitch or a setting I can change? How do I prevent or remove this distortion? I have no idea.
To me, it looks like a reflection capture/specular light reflection is taking over where the SSR can no longer work (since its outside the camera’s frustum, it isn’t rendered and can’t be reflected)
I think Crow hit the nail on the head. Here’s a bit more detail from the devs:
TLDR: Screen Space Reflections can only reflect things that appear on the screen (as implied in the name). As your pitch the camera, the wall that was reflecting on the floor is no longer being rendered, so it can’t be reflected. All you’re left with is lighting. You could solve the issue with Planar Reflections, but this can be very costly.
I would suggest tweaking the material for the floor so that it matches the colors of the walls more closely, that way when they aren’t reflected the effect will be less noticeable.
Just place more reflection captures around the scene. As you look down, there isn’t anything for Screen-Space Reflections to ‘see’ so you lose them. That’s what the soft transition is- SSR to whatever reflection actor you have in the scene.
That’s also why there’s always numerous capture probes around levels to cover missing SSR and reduce light leaking. Usually you have a global probe, then more localized ones for major areas, then even smaller ones for areas you view up close.
My suggestion would be to disable screen space reflections, then place the reflection capture actors so it matches well with the scene, and then re-enable screen space reflection.
Thank you for the replies I learned new facts about reflections today. I solved this with planar reflection and turned off update per frame. It probably needed more reflection actors, as you all have suggested - that were unloaded from different levels streaming in/out of being rendered.
Looks smooth and handles great now.