From the course: Unreal Engine: ArchViz Design Techniques

Adding realistic mirror reflections

From the course: Unreal Engine: ArchViz Design Techniques

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Adding realistic mirror reflections

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- [Instructor] One way to really add life to a scene is with Realistic Mirrors, but there are a couple hidden settings to make them work properly. First, you'll need to go into Project Settings, and then find Rendering down here under Engine. Go ahead and type in on the search bar at the top, global and look for Support global clip plane for Planar Reflections and make sure this is checked on. If it's not checked already it'll require a restart of the Engine. Now that we've gotten that taken care of, we'll need to enable Planar Reflections on a per material basis. So, let's close this and head over to a mirror material that we already have in the scene. Now as you can see, it has some Baked Reflections already, but what we want are live realistic Planar Reflections. So, go ahead and select the asset and then navigate over to its Mirror Material. Double click this to open. Now, if you select the material node itself, I'm going to maximize this so I can see, now scroll down until you come to the Forward Shading section. From here, there's a check box to enable Planar Reflections. Now on the surface it won't appear to do much at first, that's because we need to add a Planar Reflection capture to our scene. So, let's close the Material and head over to the Modes panel. Go down to Visual Effects and grab this Planar Reflection and just click and drag it into the scene. Now, you'll see this sort of infinite mirror here. We can toggle this on and off with the Show Preview Plane check box. And, this just let's us know roughly where our mirror's positioned. So, now what we need to do is rotate it to properly align with our mirror. So, once it's roughly in line with the plane, then go ahead and turn off this Preview Plane. And now you'll notice that it's a much more accurate reflection. And, let me go ahead and hide and show this, just so you can see the difference. Baked Reflection and live Planar Reflection, much better. Now, you may be noticing that the reflection is at a much lower resolution than the rest of the scene. The way that we fix that is in the Planar Reflection Settings, scroll down to Screen Percentage and bump this up or down however you like. Now, 100% is essentially the same resolution as the rest of the scene, but keep in mind that these Planar Reflections add a lot of performance cost, so use sparingly.

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