Reflection captures invalidated between saves

Development Rendering
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1

Every time I hit save in the editor for my project, the reflection capture for my scene gets invalidated. Here is how it’s supposed to look:

Here you can see the patch on the top of the octopus’s head that reflects the sky’s color.

After I hit save and then hit play, this is what I get:

Here you can see the odd rim around the top. It seems to drop out the zenith and leave the horizon? I’m not sure.

If I hit Build → Update reflection captures it goes right back to looking correct.

This is super problematic because I have to save in order to play the game in any standalone solution. Any ideas what might be happening?

Thanks!

2

Hi Brian,

I’ve just tested and am not able to get this to reproduce for me.

Here is a screen shot of my test.

14115-refelectioncapture.png
14115-refelectioncapture.png718×592 309 KB

In my example here I’ve setup a material with a constant 3 color for red with a roughness value of .2.
In the sphere reflection capture I set the brightness to 4.0 to see it more clearly.

On the left is a static mesh and the right is a skeletal mesh. I was not able to see a difference between these using your steps.

Which version of the engine are you using? Are you able to setup a simple scene in a new project and replicate? Also, how is your material setup for the character, for example, is there anything other than texture samples being used?

Thank you!

Tim

3

Hey Tim, sorry for the delayed response.

I dug a bit more into this. I’ve been using a sky dome mesh with a translucent material on it for my ceiling (the water’s surface).

As soon as I switched it over to an opaque shader, these problems went away. Any idea why that might be? I’m trying to make it very bright, blue water. It has some scrolling caustic patterns on it, but nothing too crazy.

The reason I’d like it to be translucent is so that you can see some of the land that’s around outside of the ceiling at some points. I’d also like to be able to make some nice rim effects using depth. Another issue is that using an opaque mesh like that, it seems to break my lightmap generation for some reason. Even if I flag the object to not cast shadows, my terrain ends up with huge, black rectangles all over it.

4

Hey Brian, Apologies for this one slipping through the cracks. I just tried setting this up in 4.7 as best I could with the details listed. I’m not seeing anything that I can recognize. I did setup a custom sky dome this time instead of using the BP_Skysphere as I did in my original test.

Are you still seeing the same issue persist with later engine versions?

5

Hey Tim, thanks for checking up on this. As of 4.7 I can’t repro this issue any more :slight_smile: Thanks!

6

Woops just kidding, I am still running into this when using a translucent shader as a sky material with nothing behind it. If I switch it to an opaque shader then it works as expected. I will get better repro steps when I get home tonight. Thanks!

7

Also I just looked a little closer at your screenshot and it does look like it’s reproing there too … The area between the sun disk and the horizon should be blue, right? It looks like there’s a rim of blue, then no reflection for the sky, and then the strong highlight for the sun disk.

8

Hey this appear to be fixed in 4.12! hooray!