Hello, well I’ve been experimenting and studying the reflections on UE4 4.7 Preview 5, and well, I created my material with 0 Roughness and then put a sphere capture reflection (or that thing) in front of my model with the mirror-material applied. Now, the results are fascinating but the problem that I saw is that this is real-time reflection, and I don’t want that because.
1.- It has a big impact on performance.
2.- My character is not visible.
So I wonder if there’s a way to capture the reflections and save them as textures inside the Editor. I remember that UDK had a feature like this, but I don’t know how to do it.
The surfaces of the material are 100% flat, does 2D camera capture (or that thing again) can help with this?
Again, what I only want is to save the reflections as textures, I don’t want real-time reflections.
Hey Georgespartan01 -
The Sphere Reflection Capture Actors actually do not store real-time reflections. Real Time Reflections are only generated by SSR via the post process. You can adjust your camera or add a Post Process Volume and set the intensity of SSR to 0 and real time reflections will stop. Sphere Reflection Capture Actors actual work very similarly to the reflection actors in UDK. They take a snapshot and store a cubemap of the influence radius and the engine will blend between the various cubemaps as you move around a level. If you get closer to a particular Sphere actor you will have more of its cubemap showing then say a sphere actor which covers the entire level. I want to stress the blending is done by the engine but it is not real time. The cubemaps themselves are not stored as textures themselves which always the engine to scale them more accurately over a level without pixelation and too much distortion.
Now as our reflection documentation recommends, a flat mirror surface using just the Sphere Actors or the SSR will always generate a specific amount of distortion. You could use a Scene Capture 2D or Cube to take a snapshot from your placed actor which would occur at runtime and as long as you uncheck (set to false) Capture Every Frame, you would have a Texture which could be passed into your materials as a static photo of your level.
Thank You
Eric Ketchum
Yes you’re right. After building light and other stuff I saw that the reflections were not real time after it. Thanks