Hello guys. I’m unfortunately having an issue with a water material shader made initially for a calm pond, as you can probably tell by the title.
The reflections, normals, and(or) distortion seem to pop in and out at weird camera angles. There also seems to be an effect where objects below the water fade, and while I like this effect I’d like to control it so that it doesn’t fade so quickly.
I made the material using the official documentation, though with a few alterations to it like changing the default normal map used, changing how the normal panning works so I can customize it with instances, and converting a few things to parameters so I can fine tune them with instances. Below are pictures of the material setup.
Any help with getting these things to actually work would be a blessing!
Hi TooMuchStarbucks,
What you’re seeing a result of Screen Space Reflections (SSR). It is limited to only reflecting what it can see. There are a couple of settings in the Post Process Volume that can help make this better, but again, it can only reflect what it can see in the viewport.
The second option is to use box/sphere reflection captures. These will capture a screenshot of the static (non-movable) environment and blend with the SSR. These do no work with translucent materials at the moment, but an experimental implementation is planned for 4.8. It was hard to tell in your video, but if you’re material is not set to translucent, you should see some results using a box/sphere reflection capture.
You can read more about these here:
Also, while the water tutorial you posted is a good start, there is a better example that was setup by one of our Technical Artists, Alan Willard, that has three different water examples (Ocean, Lake, and translucent)
You can download this from the **Learn **tab in the Launcher to add to your project.
You can see it demonstrated in these two videos.
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Videos/Player?series=PLZlv_N0_O1gYq4tiS45UAgghUxoF916rH&video=aJ1M0Ejd_ts
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Videos/Player?series=PLZlv_N0_O1gYq4tiS45UAgghUxoF916rH&video=-XyeFXdKi08
I hope this helps and if you have any questions feel free to ask. 