Singlelayerwater missing skylight reflection

Hello,

My project is utilizing Oceanology with static lighting. The ocean reflection is being derived from the skylight, with SSR being disabled. However, a very small subset of users on our Q/A team are having a problem where the skylight is not working properly. In some cases the ocean is completely black, and other times it has the correct colour, but no reflection at all.


It seems that the problem is primarily with users with 1000 series Nvidia or last gen AMD GPUs. All drivers are up to date. There is no change based on the RHI used, DX11 or DX12. The engine version being used is UE5.0.3

Forcing the skylight to recapture does not work.

Has anyone come across this, and is there some solution?

I see there is an entry in the UE5.1 patch notes that says: “Applied a fix for Reflection Captures sometimes showing up black in packaged games”.

I will test this in 5.1 on Monday and report back.

I can confirm this is not fixed in V5.1

Any ideas?

Single layer water means a custom material.

Just output the cubemap into it yourself. If you use the right hdri it can even look better than an accurate capture.
Generally speaking you cannot see 1:1 reflections in a moving pool of water, so the “hint” of it reflecting is all you are really after.

There should be a decent example within the sample content for the human eye, but really it’s not rocket surgery, even using an image as the base color before adjusting its coloring will probably net decent results…

Can’t get it to work correctly with oceanology directly in the material following the example for the human eye in content examples.

Using a cubemap on the skylight instead of capture also doesn’t work.

Proably change from single layer water to a regular material - since it’s an open ocean you dont even need refraction anyway.
It prevents you having to alpha sort the gerstner wave order if you don’t even try to use transparency…