Water reflection problem at the edges

Development World Creation
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1

Hello, I am currently working on a cinematic render using UE5, and facing the following issue:

Problem: As you can see in the screenshot below, the water reflection along the edges are too bright, which looks like an outline and not very realistic looking. I am using the Movie Render Queue to render it. The problem clearly noticeable with the Anti-Aliasing turned on (set to 16 or 32 in the screenshots). The problem is not much noticeable when rendered with anti-aliasing turned off (3rd screenshot), but the overall quality is of course better with AA turned on (which is definitely I want - best possible render quality).

Current settings (and what have been tried, but didn’t solve the problem): “Water Body River” has been used with “Planar Reflection” (I have also tried with multiple Sphere Reflection Capture). All the lights in the scene are “Movable”.

Reflection settings in Project Settings
  • Reflection Method: Lumen (tried the other 2 options as well)
  • Reflection Capture resolution: 1024
  • Reduce lightmap mixing on smooth surfaces: True
  • Support global clip plane for Planar Reflections: True
  • Mobile Reflection Capture Compression: False
  • Planar Reflection Mode: Usual
Anti-Aliasing settings (Movie Render Queue)
  • Spatial sample count: 1
  • Temporal sample count: 16 or 32
  • Override Anti-aliasing: True
  • Anti-aliasing method: None
  • Use camera cut for warmup: False
  • Use render frames: False
  • Render warmup count: 32
  • Engine warmup count: 0

Screenshots:
(1) Rendered image (with AA):

problem with water reflection
problem with water reflection1071×568 254 KB

(2) Marks to help identify the problem area:

problem with water reflection - marked
problem with water reflection - marked1071×568 254 KB

(3) Rendered without Anti-aliasing:

scene - no AA
scene - no AA1071×568 284 KB

(4) “Unlit” preview in the viewport:
image

Apologies if the post is not in the correct category, this is my first time posting in this forum. Also sorry for the long post. I am pretty much new to Unreal Engine, so tried to provide information which may be relevant.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

Hi!

I’m facing a similar problem. In addition, maybe caused by the same root cause, I also have incorrect reflections of the objects near the water (grass and the like). In the render, each individual frame seems ok but when I see the cinematic, it’s clear that each frame reflects something slightly different, causing flickering.

Did you solve your issue? Did you notice something similar to what I described?
Thanks a lot!

3

Hello, sorry for the late reply.

Actually I could not find any solution… magically the problem was lessened during my final render (I didn’t change any settings and also can’t remember changing anything in the map, I have no idea what went different; grace of god I suppose :roll_eyes:). Then finally had to fix the rest of the remaining reflection related issues (around the boat mainly) in After Effects.

I did not have the flickering reflection issue though. For me it was just the edges of the reflection were wrong.