Hey Tech Artists out there. What's the best way to do reflections in water shaders these days? Currently got a camera based setup, it's pretty costly, but I do love how it looks though. - ThreadSky

nicholasmc1.bsky.social • 135 days ago

Hey Tech Artists out there.

What's the best way to do reflections in water shaders these days? Currently got a camera based setup, it's pretty costly, but I do love how it looks though.

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dawnart.xyz•134 days ago

yeah its still one of those things thats so situational, but generally i try planar reflections if i can (just keeps it simple and can solve a bunch of situations), and otherwise look at ssr if i need. if youre using hdrp, they have realtime planar reflection probes that work pretty alright

nicholasmc1.bsky.social•134 days ago

HDRP is the future for this project but currently it's BRP so I'll keep that in mind when I upgrade. Thanks for the advice.

mattfatmarrow.bsky.social•135 days ago

You have to define 'best'. Greatest fidelity? Best performance? Best trade off between the two? Quite context dependent. Engine-specific too. Unreal Engine is deferred render, so reflections are hard or costly. In most cases a static cube map reflection blended with surface detail is the way.

nicholasmc1.bsky.social•135 days ago

My priorities are low iteration times, performance at least better than what I've got now and ideally maintain a similar quality.

It's a unity project in BRP currently but likely going to move to HDRP in the future, targeting console/PC.

nicholasmc1.bsky.social•135 days ago

Baked reflections are not ideal as the bodies of water are quite large rather than small pools so it's unlikely cubemaps will give that nice mirror pool result.

mattfatmarrow.bsky.social•135 days ago

I suspect the best outcome is quite engine dependent so I will bow out now, but I'd be interested to see what people suggest. Good luck.

nicholasmc1.bsky.social•135 days ago

Thanks anyway!

mattfatmarrow.bsky.social•135 days ago

Sometimes you can have an opaque surface, in which case standard redlection captured come back into play (unreal again). But I haven't got up to speed on UE5 yet. Maybe you can finally access ref captures in translucent materials now?

mattfatmarrow.bsky.social•135 days ago

*reflection captures

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