Water distortion is different in renders than in viewport

Hi everyone,

Complete UE4 newbie here, basically bit more than I could chew with this!

I have been working with an Ocean Body with an emissive material sphere behind it to get a sort of refracted sun look and it’s been working great so far, but for some reason it now looks very different on the Viewport than on the renders. It’s moved upwards and is too refracted, as in you can’t really see the section covered by the sphere, it just adds light sparks everywhere.
It’s as if the reflections got shifted above frame somehow?

Attached to the post are the comparison frames + my project items.

  • I built the lighting and debugged all errors I got (Drawscale3D for the sphere actors whose size went to 0, and added a LightMassImportance Volume)

  • The Post Processing (Bloom, bokeh etc) is controlled and keyframe by the CineCam Actor.

  • The water material in this reference has been reset to test, I normally had added some foam which also seemed to work just fine.

  • Tried making a new camera actor, copy-pasting my objects into a new Level.

  • I modified the camera Exposure values to Manual.

  • I’m using Movie Render Queue.

I have no clue of what to do and I’ve already sent renders with a particular look which worked, so I can’t really start from scratch…! I know it must be something really dumb but I can’t wrap my head around it.

Thanks a lot!


Viewport


Render (water is darker because it’s a different frame)


Point Lights are not driving the reflection, the Spheres are