Hello guys,
New to the engine here, so please bear with me.
I’ve been going over some reflection options in Unreal (specially for dynamic moving objects), and I’m trying to understand their behavior and limitations, and if possible some workarounds.
From what I understand so far is that we have a few options in Unreal to create reflections:
**Screen space reflections: **
A post process effect with some major drawback such as, it can only render what it sees, in other words if I tilt the camera down I will not get anything reflecting on most parts of the ground from the environment. but it produces best compromise of dynamic reflections and look, for general purpose scenes.
**
Spherical or cubic static reflection captures:**
Basically a statically captured scene either 360 degrees or cubic is projected as reflection onto the given environment within a given radius. may work well to help out some areas, but it creates inaccurate distorted images of objects in close proximity of others when viewed on flat surfaces among other things.
Finally a scene capture dynamic method: which is exactly the same as the spherical capture only difference is that it captures for every frame so if we have moving objects this would show them, understandably the doc mentions its expensive to use.
In a specific situation such as having reflections on a still body of water. and suppose a tree or a large rock in the middle, how would one approach on faking the reflections to be very accurately “mirrored” onto the surface of this object/material.
By mirrored I don’t mean placing a simple camera with a given FOV and projecting that back onto the surface, for that would never really work right it for such large surfaces, but rather having some kind of an accurate dynamic or semi dynamic reflections for this surface for a given radius or selected objects. for instance having the sky as fake static reflection along with the rocks but reflect moving objects dynamically such as characters or moving trees in the wind, also accurately, for instance you would clearly be able to see in the reflection the Bark of the tree with its correct placement and perspective moving upwards and see the leaves reflect correctly. Perhaps this is not possible for the time being, however I would like to know if there is any functional method out there in Unreal that could help us achieve proper dynamic mirror like reflections.
While I am wondering about the above question, I have another:
The image test below shows a strange behavior with screen space reflections, it seems that the closer i bring this cubic wall to the objects such as the trees the “better” the reflections are represented, is this a limitation with the reflection method? why are the reflections not displaying correctly without having a very close wall?
Thank you very much.