So I have a pretty large room with a bunch of stainless steel machines… and man, these reflections are throwing me for a loop. They make no sense at all. I am trying to place these Sphere reflection captures around the scene and they are just giving almost random results? Do I need like 1000 of these? or do you use 3/4? Or what. What is the purpose of this? If you have a scene with a reflective material wouldn’t you want the reflections to be accurate? And if you didn’t want reflections wouldn’t you just fix that in the material? Sorry just super frustrated, coming from a 3d renderer where reflections just work correctly…
thanks, I have also read the docs on these and still doesn’t make sense. Something about putting one inside the other then adding more inside the other? Then when I overlap them, they give me random results again…
Spherical reflections will capture the scene from the origin of the actor(by default) and project it spherically within it’s bounds. This means that pretty much the farther away from the origin an object is, the more distorted it will be. If you want more accurate, pre-computed reflections, then try the Box Reflection Actor. Similar concept of capturing from the origin, but the projection is more accurate for the 6 sides, although it is still a little distorted depending on the size and blend radius.
Hm, still not quite making sense to me. (Rose, love that library by the way, I saw that on youtube a week ago or so). Here is a screen shot. Pretty basic, the floor isn’t reflecting the wall divider that is right above it. I wish I could attach the machines that are all stainless steel. there are like 40 of them, but its clients so I can’t really. But half the battle is getting this floor to reflect anything accurately
In the case of Baked Reflections, you need to make sure your Reflection Captures also contain the Wall Divider.
Also make sure that the StaticMeshComponent has “Visible in Reflection Captures” set.
Dynamic Objects cannot be reflected. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/…es/Reflections
Thanks Raildex, I have looked at that documentation most of the day yesterday… I have a Reflection Capture covering the entire scene and little ones all around but still nothing accurate at all. I also double checked that the object is static and “Visibile in Reflections Captures” is set. Is this just a limitation to unreal? A lot of reflective surfaces? I know I read that if you blur the reflection, which I have done in my stainless material, it should work well. But I legit just don’t have some things in the scene reflecting at all… As you can see in the screenshot.
I honestly have changed the “Build Reflection Captures” button to the “Random” button.
There is a special Viewport for Reflections (make sure to turn of SSR and Temporal Antialiasing because it will interfere with baked Reflections).
In there you can see which Reflection Capture causes which Reflection.
Make sure you have Screen Space Reflections turned on, the reflection situation you’re looking at will not work correctly if you’re only using spherical reflection captures. SSR will render the reflections in real-time which will be more accurate and then fill in the areas that it can’t see with the reflection capture info.
Yeah I can def see this viewport and see what they are doing, but it makes 0 sense to me. I cant for the life of me get the reflection to line up with the bottom of that divider. Its just super distorted when I move the sphere captures around…
The Screen space reflections is in the Post Process Volume right? I have that turned on and it doesn’t appear to be doing anything at all.
I apologize to everyone, but I just can’t wrap my head around this concept…
Thanks for the input and hopefully we can figure this out!
Box reflection capture actor would help with the distortion. Or you can use planar reflections for the foor.
Screen space reflections should be a 50 or 100 quality.
You can also increase the roughness value or add some more normal variation to help mask the inaccurate reflections. There’s a reason why video games use very reflective surfaces in moderation.
If your room has 4 corners its always better to use a box reflection capture as that will have parallax correction and thus blend with the screen space reflections in a more accurate way.
Going to try all of this today! Thanks everyone. It is just sooooo much reflecting going on in my scene. 50 or so stainless steel machines all across from one another in rows…
Yeah still cant get it… Planar reflection is right when I apply it to the floor. Exactly what I am looking for, but how do I like combine that with my tile floor texture? Wish there was like some type of opacity setting for it, or blend or something…
The plane is just there to visualize the placement and what is reflected. You can press ‘G’ to switch to game mode, which hides it since the plane is purely an editor thing, or just uncheck the option in the object settings. Just line it up with your floor so that the reflection looks correct and that’s all you have to do.
I have no idea how, but I got the planar reflection working on the floor. But I can’t get it working on the machines… Can you have only 1 per scene or something? Can I have multiple? Getting close. thanks again for the tips and help!
I even tried just taking the floor one that is working and rotating to the side of the machine, and it still doesn’t work. It seems to only work on the floor… so confusing…
I turned off Forward Shading and was able to get multiple planar reflections to work! But now all the stainless steel is super dark. So I wanted to turn down the specular/metallic so it would catch more light, to lighten it a bit and turned up the roughness. But now when I turn the roughness past .3 it seems, it goes completely black… Anyone know why this might be happening?
Thanks!
Wow I think I figured it out. it was that Foward Shading screwing everything up. A coworker was trying things before me and enabled it because we are doing VR, but the scene isn’t that large so hopefully we don’t need it on…
Everything is working what seems to be correctly now, box and sphere reflections are actually looking and acting correctly. If you want to see what trouble I was having and the disconnect, turn on forward shading and try to have a bunch of them reflections spheres and boxes and you will see what I mean. What a mess, but everything seems to be at least making sense now, instead of just “Random” like I said before.
Thanks everyone who tried to help me. Kinda hard to help when things weren’t working the same way as what was being explained…