Water hacks: How do I turn off reflections for a single actor

[BjornToulouse]

I’ve been really struggling with a water set up. Basically I have an character in front of a lake with a landscape behind. The reflections are crucial to the shot. The lake and the trees look great, with the water gently rippling, using a simple reflective water shader which uses translucency + screen space reflections. The object animates in front of the lake, with the lake as the backdrop. should be a very simple shot.

The problem is you see the movement of the character in the lake BEHIND the character. Weather I use lumen or hardware raytracing the problem still persists. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to stop the horrible reflections in the water. I have changed every single setting, with or without lumen. Turned off screen traces, nothing seems to work.

I tried to set up render passes so i could render the foreground and background seperately… this is the closest i’ve got to a decent result, but it’s extremely painful as I have quite a few detailed objects to manage. The landscape renders incorrectly in the render layers (perhaps due to some kind of corrupted previous undeletable landscape streaming proxy i believe) which means the stencil layers and movie rendergraph are both pretty useless. I have had to manually fix eaxh reflection error with patches here and there but it’s extremely time consuming and means having to nurse every shot in detail.

My question is, does anyone have experience with these errors and some workflows to manage this? Are there any hacks for using lake/water textures and some how turning off ‘visible in reflections’ for certain characters? (visible in raytracing has no effect)

[BjornToulouse]

my guesses as to the cause of this:

1. The landscape is very far back. Could this affect the ability of lumen to calculate the surface cache etc?
2. For some reason screen space reflections are being used instead of hardware reflections. Perhaps because of the water shader I am using. Is there a water shader that does not force screen space reflections? Which water shader should I use?

[BjornToulouse]

in my post process volume i set the reflections / global ilumination to both lumen and none, turning on and off screen traces, changing every possible setting and i still get this:

whilst the path tracer shows how it should look:

and no matter what i change i can’t get the surface cache to how anything other than this:

the whole thing is exaggerated horribly when you animate the balls in any way.

This is just with a straightforward metallic plane. So no screen space reflections in the shaders translucency, or anything like that. Is there something i am doing wrong? Is there a hack to avoid this?