Screen space reflection poor resolution

I tried to changing the resolution of the SSR, Putting the quality up to a 100% in the Post Processing Volume and changing the Scalability Ini file. I really want to increase the quality of the SSR.

Added a screenshot.

Bump is necessary :wink:

Hi Drievus,

You can improve the quality by following the steps in this tutorial page here created by one of our community members: 3D Modeling & Texturing: [Unreal Engine 4] Improving Screen Space Reflections

While the quality will improve, at an obvious performance cost, there will still be the artifact of the gap at the edges of the screen and the bottom of the boxes from some views. As the name implies Screen Space Reflections can only reflect what is visible in the screen at the time and will not know what is outside of the screen view.

Coming in 4.12 you’ll have access to Planar Reflections that can really help. Look for more information on this in the release notes once that is ready.

Thank you!

Tim

I tried looking for the ScreenSpaceReflections.usf file, but it doesn’t seem to be there.

This file hasn’t changed locations. Just navigate to your Engine Installation folder usually in Program Files.

Then once you open the engine folder it’ll be located in Engine\Shaders\ScreenSpaceReflections.usf

I found it and changed it, it seems to looks better, but it’s not perfect. SSR is used alot in games, what can I do to make it look better and more realistic?

Screen space is definitely used in a lot of games, but it’s not the sole contributor to reflections in the scene. You’ll want to use Reflection Capture Actors in your scene as well to help give an ease to the transition. The biggest factor with using SSR though is that you want to add some roughness to the material so that the transition between the reflection capture actors and SSR is not as easy to notice.

This is where 4.12 comes in and will offer a new type of reflections with Planar Reflection Actors.

Here is a comparison of SSR on the right and Planar Reflections from 4.12.

This is just a limitation of using SSR that you have to find ways to mask it. With Planar Reflections, even though there is an additional cost to using them they can provide a much better result for your scene when you have a need for very reflective surfaces.

I really appreciate all the tips + information you are giving me. When using reflection probes my transition it very direct, I did find a box transisition option which fades it out. By using this feature i do lose alot of lighting information.

The hard transition is something that is unavoidable unfortunately without altering the materials roughness to hide the fact. With the Reflection captures box and sphere the scene is captured and put into a cubemap that is assigned to the reflection actor.These cubemaps are not dynamic and will not reflect anything dynamic in the scene, so it definitely does create this hard transition at times and can be obvious depending on the scene. I think once 4.12 drops and you get a chance to work with the planar reflections you’ll get some awesome results that will easily meet the needs of what you’re wanting to achieve without much headache and setup. :slight_smile:

Here is another example from seeing what was possible with these earlier. I have four walls all with their own planar reflections actor. The reflections inside the reflection are using SSR. The basic material has a roughness of .25 to help hide some extra artifacts from the SRR from in the inside the planar reflections.

87831-planarreflections2.gif

The Planar Reflections look very helpful, and very useful, will certainly try them out when available. Going back to the Reflection Spheres/Cubes. It seems like when you make the reflection sphere/cube area too big it starts being very inaccurate. Is there a certain way to use them properly?

This documentation should help you with some of the placement and how to work them better. The idea is to keep the radius smaller to be closer to the room size or the area you need. These are just cubemaps so it won’t be 100% accurate in size or quality since they are just projections. This can lead to harder transitions between your SSR and the Reflection captures.

I always stumble upon something, is there a way I can reach you if I have any more questions?

I can’t guarantee private support, but you’re more than welcome to follow me on Twitter @TimHobsonUE4 and if you have questions there I can point you in the right direction hopefully.

I also have my personal site HERE if you are interested in leaving comments about anything rendering related you’d like to see me add as a tutorial or more information about.

Other than that I’ve had users also just send me messages on the forums with their already publicly posted questions from the Forums and AnswerHub with a short description. If it’s something I’m familiar with and I have the time to help I often leave a response. :slight_smile:

I can’t always guarantee I’ll answer, but I do when I can.

Thanks mate, I appreciate it. Thanks for the assist.