Already built 4.12 and going to test it more today! so far I’ve made glass with planar reflections. Looks much better than anything we had before 
About weird reflections, not sure what do you mean. May you demonstrate it with image?
About 2nd question. There is PlanarReflectionPlane mesh in Engine Content. It’s possible to replace it with circle. (Very quick test ) Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life
I’m talking about what you can see in the picture dokipen posted above. Look at reflections of the walls.
I noticed you can change the capture probe resolution in 4.12 too… must be a new feature. Dunno if there’s a limit but At least we now have more options.
The default value was 128 :-S
I began testing planar reflections in 4.12 preview: it works and still have bugs but the most important for now is that it doesn’t work like drescribes it in this post:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?104558-How-to-create-Infinity-Mirror
The most important in what Ryan said is :
I didn’t see where you could tag meshes to be reflected. Maybe I missed it… Did anyone find it?
Also:
For now, you can’t attach any particular render target to the player camera. It seems that the engine generates one but that you don’t have access to it. So you can’t place it in a material and can’t have control over fresnel falloff and other stuff you could have to make.
So I’d like to know from Epic’s staff if this planar reflection feature will be left as it is for the most part or if we will be able to have more control over reflections in the final 4.12 release. In particular, will it be possible to:
- assign a render target manually in the “scenecapture” section and have access to all the postprocess settings you usually find in a scenecapture actor ?
- do “whatever we want to how it is rendered” by placing the render target in the material of the reflecting mesh ?
I’ve noticed this too, but current system looks more advanced, more “true” compared to planar reflections that were described by (as I understand it). It lacks many useful things, but it works and has acceptable cost. According to Daniel Wright:“Planar reflections as implemented in 4.12 are what I would consider the minimum to be usable. They don’t apply fog / atmosphere correctly, there aren’t any good controls for disabling expensive features in the reflection, dynamic shadows don’t work correctly in the reflection, and a few other things.” (Missing vital SceneCaptureReflectActor for real-time planar reflections - Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums) Not bad for the beginning and let’s hope, more to come.
I would say more “out of the box”, as you only have to add a planar reflections component and that’s it. But that’s all. With all the missing features described, for now, it is less advanced.
Yes, indeed. But more can only come if the feature is designed to allow access to the render target and work on it in a material where
it will be finally plugged to diffuse or emissive. Otherwise, there will always be less control over the final rendering of the reflections (even if they add options like they already did - distorsion, fade-out distance, etc…) than working with scenecaptures and rendertargets.
I would suggest that EPIC should add water volumes out of box that has depth easily controllable and quality same like Cryengine or even better, current water solutions are still hacky and not right like it should be.
No distortion like UE3. The Refraction can not be used for water plane (terrible artifacts!).
Thats up to the artist i have pretty nice waterdistortion…