I’ve run into an issue in Blender 4.2 with the new version of Eevee. In the reflections, light objects seem to go through other objects. I’ve tried adjusting just about every Eevee related setting to mitigate the issue, to no avail.
As far as my testing shows, speculars in the new Eevee are occluded based on their own light’s shadow, which is problematic in the case of very soft shadows.
This is the right idea for a workaround, but you need to do it slightly different. keep both the mesh and the area light, but deactivate the light’s glossy contribution in its light settings.
That way, the area light can do the diffuse lighting and the plane can do the specular. Just keep in mind that this trick won’t work as well if the area light is behind the camera, as the screen space reflections won’t see the emissive mesh (you would have to use reflection probes).
This is what keeps me from using eevee next/4.2. With multiple lights in a scene you get tons of reflections all over the place where there should be none (and where for the most part are none in 4.1)
This is also the kind of reason why most renderers and big studios use raytracing these days and switched to it as soon as it became feasible. Sure, it’s slower, but it’s pixel accurate and perfectly consistent and predictable. Big studios with access to render farms were willing to spend that extra render time to avoid dealing with renderers doing weird stuff and spoiling a render. Non-raytracers need to use all kinds of complicated trickery to get anywhere near the same result.
