[Gear VR] Roughness maps, Reflection captures and Stationary Light problems

Yeah the UE4 mobile pipeline always uses the forward renderer not the deferred for performance reasons so doesn’t matter if you change that setting or not - that’s for non-mobile builds.

Have you tried turning on mobile HDR? If it’s not working with that then chances are it’s just not supported in the UE4 mobile pipeline yet?

Reading the documentation on Reflections (cause my roughness maps were coming wrong on ES2) I came across this:

Static light types should not be used together with the Reflection Environment as they will put direct lighting in the lightmap

Which makes sense, I guess.

If I understand correctly then, for a full PBR pipeline implementation on the Gear VR we need ONLY the Indirect light term to modulate the Reflections. So No Shadows and direct lightning baked from the Direct Light.

That leaves us with the need for an Dynamic Shadow solution. In Mobile we have Cascade Shadow Maps (that cost a lot I know, I know) and modulated shadows.

Technically, if I understood everything correctly we can use a Stationary Direct Light, that bakes the GI bounces on the static lightmaps (contributing to the oclussio part of the reflection mix) but also can project dynamic shadows.

Now, at least in ES2 (the ONLY standard that I can run on my S7) no Dynamic Shadow Solution seems to be working (no cascades nor modulated shadows)
In this state it seems that we have to choose between incorrect reflections (with full stationary direct light baked the lightmaps that will be mixed with the reflections later) or no shadows at all.

Is there a workaround to get this thing working Right?
The problem is that this breaks the whole PBR pipeline for Gear VR, it makes a material that looks OK on Substance Painter for example look wrong on the GearVR. Specifically it breaks the glossiness map (the effect seems to be more noticiable on close-but-not fully rough surfaces)

halp pls!

I’m Guessing I could:

  • bake only the indirect term
  • Then manually make cubemaps for every reflection capture actor and replace the capture
  • then re-bake with static lights.

Seems super troublesome tho.

humm, I’m using the Forward Renderer, and digging in the documentation and answerhub says Dynamic only Directional Lights are not yet supported for Forward Rendering.
I’m gonna try with the Deferred renderer and I’ll be back.

Nope, no dynamic shadows in GearVR with the Deferred Renderer.
Are the Oculus guys blocking something? (I don’t care if my game runs at 10fps, is just for testing!)
or I’m not understanding something?

btw, the ES2 - android preview shows dynamic shadows from the direct light on the editor (with the forward renderer, which is kinda weird, since is not supported supposedly,and the deferred)

Hi Aussieburger.
I can’t run mobile HDR on my S7 on GearVR.
It renders all black.
I’m assuming mobile HDR for mobile VR is not working at all. But I probably should test more.

According to my tests the standard Deferred Renderer runs on the GearVR, but yeah, it looks bad (I think is the temporal anti aliasing) and probably performs bad too.