Having multiple serious issues with Planar reflections, I’m unsure when the issues were introduced but here in the first screenshot I have an old project open using 4.18 which shows the planar reflection working well.
The red arrows are showing that ‘Distance from plane fadeout start/end’ is working as expected, controlling the fade from the center/edge of the plane.
Here in the second screenshot is my current project in 4.22 where we have many issues with planar reflections.
First off, an independent simple issue I want to get out of the way - planar reflection quality is much lower than in the past. Screen resolution does not appear to be at ‘100’ and setting it to beyond for example at ‘150’ has no effect.
The strange behaviour that is causing critical issues with this project is how planar reflections work in 4.22 in regards to ‘distance from plane fadeout’. Both ‘start’ and ‘end’ have to be set at the same distance, for this example ‘200cm’ for it to behave as a mirror at all. The red arrows show that this setting now controls the ‘depth’ distance away from the plane rather than fading the center/edges on the plane itself.
You can see in this screenshot that the planar reflection does not work at all if the camera is outside of this 200CM distance. This causes many issues, too many to detail now.
In this screenshot you can see that as soon as you move the camera within this distance the planar reflection will pop in and work.
However, increasing the fade distance also turns other objects into mirrors as long as their roughness is not set to 1.0. The red highlighted area shows a stone panel turn into a highly reflective surface. Along with turning things into highly reflective surfaces, it also completely breaks how reflections work in that area, the stone is now reflecting the sky and exterior of the building.
Lastly this image is to help illustrate the issue with planar reflections not working at all unless within the distance fade ‘box’
