Hi there - I’m having trouble getting reflections working in 4.2. See below…
My objects are standing on a disc with a 0 roughness, 1 metallic shader. The intention for this disc is that it would act as water between cobblestones that partially reflect the characters and objects above it (removing the metallic), but for the moment I’ve set it up as a ‘perfect mirror’.
Raytracing is turned on.
As you can see, the disc only reflects the light source above it (the white circle near the centre). No objects or characters are reflected by the disc.
Additionally, if I increase the roughness of the Principled BSDF, I can get some shadows cast by the characters and objects - but there seems to be a lack of contact shadows (stronger darkening where two surfaces meet).
Can anybody help me turn on reflections in 4.2? Can anybody help me strengthen my contact shadows?
…what’s weird is that it DOES work on a standard scene…
I’m honestly kinda baffled. These objects have the same settings. In the second image, I just copied the box and plane in from the right hand iteration of Blender…
I notice the alpha is set to 0.5. This makes me think you probably tweaked a bunch of settings on the material.
If you replace the material with a fresh one and just set the roughness to 0, does the reflection appear? If it does, you will know the problem is in the material.
Would you know how to create stronger shadowing at contact points between objects? Seems weird I can’t get that working with normal lights in my project.
The materials should work. What are your raytracing settings? Are they turned on correctly in the render settings? What are the settings inside the raytracing tab? Did you alter those?
Would you be willing to upload the problematic scene? If you don’t want to spread the project online, you could strip it of the important models, leaving only the floor, lights and other effects.
I think what you have here is a combination of a few things.
The reflection probe seems misplaced. It’s slightly under the surface, which means it doesn’t capture anything. If you move it upward a little bit, it will start working. Try it in material preview mode, it’s easier to see the difference with the HDRI.
The water shader seems weirdly built. I am not sure what it’s supposed to do, but it’s not reacting well to reflections. I find that I get much clearer reflections if I rebuild it as a more standard water shader. This means 0 metallic, transparency done using transmission rather than alpha, refractions activated with the correct IOR for water, and a thickness value of 0 (infinite) as it’s a single-sided surface with unlimited depth. I also have included the light path trick to control the water’s shadow, like I would in Cycles (new Eevee does react to this, unlike the older version).
This will give you a realistic result. If you want to cheat and add more reflection, you can increase the metallic until it looks like you want.
The scene is very dark and there is just not much to see in the reflection even when it works. Maybe if the pebbles were somewhat reflective too, like they are wet?
I see that the new Eevee has a problem / limitation with wide lights. It seems that their specular gets occluded based on the light’s shadow rather than on the surface’s roughness like it should. This means that very wide lights have speculars that leak through obstacles.
The first image is what Eevee does. The specular disappears progressively, following the soft shadow of its own light source. The second image is what it should do, simulated with an emissive sphere (it’s occluded sharply, because the surface has low roughness). I am not sure this problem is visible in your scene when viewed from the camera, but you have to stay vigilant about this (and it will be visible from some angles in the viewport and will look wrong).
