Im trying to make a basic water material that will simply reflect everything like a mirror. For some reason I am getting these big black spots where there is no reflection. This is shown in the first screen shot. When I look straight down at the water I see total blackness.
The second screen shot is my material nodes
You are using SSR and SSR only shows what’s in the screen, that’s why you cant see the rest of the sky on the surface. If you want that kind of mirror like water surface use screen capture 2d actor.
sorry im fairly new to Unreal. what is a screen capture 2d actor?
cool thanks! is using screen capture 2d actor more gpu intensive?
There is an example of it you can see and break to learn in Content Examples project > Reflections > 1.7.
It is, and since you’ll have to use a higher res. texture for that water it wont be practical for games(if you are making one) i think. If it gets too heavy you can go back to SSR and minimize those black areas by using normal maps as noise, but then it wont be a completely still water, so…
If you want real water you should use translucent material, btw. You can still use a screen capture texture for it, but not parallax corrected SSR if you decide to go back to it.
Here you can see an example of it:
But apparently you dont need to worry about it if reflections are more important than having an actual water material.
I am making a game where you fly down a river, the way I did it in Unity was to have a square chunk of water always following the player and reflecting the environment, rather than have a huge object with a water material that would cover the whole river.
I dont mind not seeing the ground through the water, id rather have the dynamic reflections if possible.
what is parallax corrected SSR?
is there an easy way to generate cubemaps in the editor from a scene Ive built?
OK thanks!
There is no cheap way of doing this. But i just had an idea…all of the things i suggested earlier were for dynamic reflections. If you can live with static reflections(screen capture’s texture rendered as a static texture) the only cost is going to be an extra texture i believe. If not, then i suggest starting a thread on this topic in the forums since i’m all out of ideas for now. :\