I’m trying to make use of Planar Reflections for mirrors in an archviz scene, but just can’t seem to get them to look good. I’ve played around with them a lot and searched through the net for answers over the past few months and still haven’t managed to work out this issue, so any help would be great.
My problem is that the reflection seems to reflect the scene with scalability set to low. I get this really ugly reflection of the scene with no shadows. It’s odd though, because I’ve seen planar reflections work very well in other examples, reflecting the scene exactly as it appears.
Here’s an image of what I’m trying to achieve. This is in 4.13:
Any news of a fix?! I know also for a fact that it was working in previous version like you show in the images. For me its working only in viewport and when i play the level or build it it shows it super bright. Everything is static and light baked in my scene.
Hey guys! Very sorry I didn’t post my solution on here sooner. Basically, it turns out that planar reflections don’t work with dynamic shadows. In our instance, ‘Dynamic Shadow Distance Stationary Light’ on our sun was turned up quite high. For those who don’t know, this allows for dynamic shadows at a distance around the player. In our instance, we were relying on this to display moving tree shadows.
Unfortunately, any shadows that fell within this radius were considered ‘dynamic’ and therefore didn’t show up in the mirror. You can actually play with this distance and see the shadows disappear or reappear in the planar reflection.
To summarise, if you bake your shadows in you’ll be fine, just be careful of ‘overriding’ your baked shadows with the dynamic shadow distance. It’s quite an annoying limitation (we struggled a lot trying to get moving tree shadows AND planar reflections in the same scene). I hope they fix it soon.
