Problem with planar reflections with more than 1 actor in the scene.

Development Rendering
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1

I have 1 planar actor and it works perfectly. When I add a 2nd one, the 1st one gets very very blurry. Sometimes it will even lose all his reflective proprieties.

Is there something I’m doing wrong?

If I hide the 2nd actor, the 1st become clear again… Can we not have more than 1 planar actor? It used to work before iirc.

I made a video to show the problem in the editor, but it’s the same thing when I launch the game. Here it is : link text

2

Hey Phil,

I’m attaching a project here that I did as a test.

link text

There are two maps here.

  • PlanarTest: Similar to your setup with multiple tiers and translucent material. This has a total of 3 planar reflection actors scaled to fit the windows.
  • PlanarTest2: This is a room with 5 planar reflection actors for each wall and a single dynamic object rotating in the center. For me, all of these work and have been scaled to the reflective surface.

If this is working for you and you see all the planar reflections, I would suggest going into your project and deleting the Intermediate and Config folders. This should reset your project settings. You will have to re-enable any settings you had in the Project Settings like “Support Global Clip Planes” for Planar Reflections, but this could possibly show if something were corrupted.

You didn’t mention in the original post, but did you try any other projects or a new blank project to see if it was only affecting this particular project?

Let me know!

Tim

3

Hey Tim!

Ok, I tested on a brand new default 1st person template, I can get more than 1 planar actor working perfectly. The scene you sent me also works fine.

Then I tried to delete the 2 folders you suggested, reopened my project, reactivated global clip plane, restarted. The problem is still there. Weird.

Maybe I can give you more infos about my scene. The whole building is 1 big mesh. I’m only using a movable sun and movable skylight.

4

That nailed it! Having the mesh as a single asset made it very reproducible.

I found a couple of issues when trying this. Using a similar setup to your scene with three levels would cause only a single reflection plane to work at a time. However, using a box inset and having reflective faces inside would do something similar if I had a reflection plane for all interior faces. They would work in Editor but in PIE or using Game View (hotkey G) would only use 2 of them out of the 4 I placed. Certainly something worth investigating and thanks for your report!

I’ve submitted a ticket for this that you can track here: Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-38140)

Thanks!

5

Good work! Thanks for the help.

6

The single mesh makes it clear what this is. Transparency only supports applying the closest planar reflection (determined per-object) much like only the closest reflection capture is applied.

7

So is it just a limitation and working as intended or it could be fixed to work with a big single mesh. The sole reason why this scene was imported as a single mesh it’s because it’s on the heavy side and slow (4000+ objects from 3ds max)