Water reflections are overly bright and tinted

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hi, 2.15.1 here.

Our users are complaining that the water reflections for the "long distance" terrain are overly bright and tinted blue, when compared to the terrain.

Here is SSR for water:

The SSR is too bright, as if the haze was overly applied to it. Also, it's flickering which is very disturbing. 

If I disable water SSR, and instead enable Water Planar reflections, I still got a similar bright tint, but no flickering:

But planar reflections are *very* costly! Way too much, in fact in our case.

Also, there is a very light sky-colored rim around the terrain reflection, that is sometime really visible:

It looks like the reflection texture wasn't clearly cut.

So, is there any way to correct the SSR tint and brightness, and remove/attenuate the flickering?

Thanks!

 

 

 

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hi.
Without understanding your scene....
To me it looks like that the rest of the water doesnt receive any reflection.

If the sky is that bright, there should be way more reflection in the water - the part from the reflected landscape towards the camera.

Do you cut out the sky somewhow? (lol your images are too ... huge to see  ;))

In the last image there is a line above the horizon line as well....

Best. Werner

[silent]

Hi Stephane,

Water SSR and haze interaction behavior was slightly adjusted in 2.16+ (at least it looks a bit better now), but overall SSR behavior and pixel flickering are remains the same. You can try to experiment with different TAA + SRAA + FXAA combinations to reduce the visual flickering, but other than that there is noting we can do yet.

I also can see that bright pixel rim reflection of terrain in Oil Platform demo when planar reflection are being used. However, the only possible way to get rid of them right now is to use higher resolution reflections, which are quite performance hungry.

More likely we can take a closer look into these 2 issues when we would improve water decals and aux for IR prior to 2.17 update. At the meantime these visuals will be remain as-is.

Thank you.