Reflective Material

Development Rendering
1

I have a first person controller, and animated bipedal mesh walking as my body. I have a room with a point light in the center. and a few reflective surfaces in the room. My reflective surfaces don’t seem to capture the mesh. They can see light glare, but no meshes are captured. The distance of the reflection doesn’t seem to capture very far from the material, and is shrouded in darkness until I get closer to it. I know I can throw in a Box/Sphere Reflection Capture to get a static reflection of the surrounding, but it looks weird when the player walks into a room and doesn’t see a reflection of themselves. Is there a reason for this and is there ways to tweak settings on this?

Thanks

Edit: I continued looking around, and I’m assuming this is related to SSR (Screen Space Reflections). And using SSR only seems very limiting to a window on a building dynamically reflecting people as they walk by. Am I on the right track?

2

Your edit is correct, currently the only fully dynamic reflections are screenspace reflections, so anything dynamic that’s not visible on screen can’t be reflected either. Fully dynamic reflections on everything is far to expensive at the moment so unreal provides you with a combination of tricks to approximate the effect.

Someone from Epic stated they are working on a render to texture style solution for flat surfaces such as mirrors and large bodies of water, but do not expect exact dynamic reflections for arbitrary shapes any time soon.

3

It makes sense. How taxing then would scene captures be then for windows?