Translucent Materials Not Reflected in Screen Space Reflections

Development Rendering
1

Hi all, been a while since I’ve worked on my own project from scratch so I can’t remember if this is a rendering limitation, or if I’m doing something wrong. It doesn’t feel like realistic behaviour for them to not reflect at all. :confused:

I’ve enabled Screen Space Reflections through the DefaultEngine.ini which is mostly working nicely, however my Translucent materials aren’t being reflected in other surfaces. The Translucent materials themselves are receiving reflections nicely, they just don’t seem to be casting much of one.

Here’s a screenshot illustrating this:

IY7zegA.png
IY7zegA.png1222×577 520 KB

And a Screenshot of the Simple Glass material:

OjfjzXm.png
OjfjzXm.png1920×1039 319 KB

Any guidance is much appreciated. :slight_smile: Cheers!

2

Screen Space Reflections can only reflect surfaces which have been written into z-buffer.
Not sure of tricks which would be feasible.

3

If you really need to to reflect, you could use a masked* material and just fake in transparency with dithering.

4

Did think this might have been a limitation - if I find a good way to fake it I’ll be sure to post results.

Thanks for the responses!

5

Here’s a really simple, but great example/tutorial of what I’m talking about:

Basically, at the simplest level, instead of using translucent mode and plugging your alpha into opacity, you first plug it into a dither function(there’s a function already built in) and plug it into opacity mask; while the material is on masked.

6

If they don’t need to move you can fake it: The Making of Bullet Train | 02 | Feature Highlight | Unreal Engine - YouTube