Water Reflection has "Holes" with Normals

Development Rendering
1

Hey there, I have a problem with my Water Material and it’s normals.
I have a parameter that flattens the NormalMap.
The Water looks okay when the Normal Map is quite flat.
But as soon As I decrease the Flatness, it starts to get holes in it, which look very ugly.

Flatness of ~.98 on both NormalMaps:

Flatness of 0 on both NormalMaps:

My Material looks like this:

I already tried using BlendAngleCorrected Normals instead of Add and I also tried removing the Normal input from Fresnel, but no luck :frowning:

2

That’s just a reflection, it’s not a hole

3

I noticed that too after investigating it more. But the Reflection is very distorted and doesn’t make sense at all.

4

It looks fine to me–if you aren’t using planar reflection captures then it’s not going to be all that accurate anyway

5

I looks the same with Planar Reflections though.

6

Try adjusting the Planar Reflection settings called “Angle from Plane Start” and “Angle from Plane End”. By default the planar reflection rejects normals where the angle is 30 degrees from the reflection plane.

It does that because the planar reflection is only truly accurate for a perfect mirror. Normals are used to shift the reflection but its not completely accurate and large angles would end up mostly pointing offscreen etc, so by default the reflection intensity is just reduced and other methods such as reflection captures will be used there. That looks to be what is going on in your images.