if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to recalculate normals after displacing your mesh within the vertex shader. e.g. in conjunction with tesselation, there is a way to do this with the "normal from height" node

(I deactivated shadows on this object to show the effect more clearly)

it can be solved like this
note that you turn off tangent space normals in the main shader properties.

However the normals are then facetted

in order to get smoothed normals, you can use the "NormalFromHeight" node

the lower the normal offset, the higher you need to set the normal intensity.

in order to get sharp reflections on glass materials, you can use a scene capture cube.

just place a scene capture cube into the scene

create a render target image

and then setup this material

The texture sample holds the render target texture of course.

For a school project i am currently working on a gigantic structure with my class. This post is constantly updated. whilst the lowest posts are the earlies WIP images and videos

this is the concept picture

H:\UnrealProjects\GD1019_Bunker\Screens\2020-12-02 21_10_14-GD1019BunkerProject - Unreal Editor.png

this is the project plan

https://open.codecks.io/monolith

this is a WIP for the scene

Ages ago a friend, Jan Kaluza (https://twitter.com/JKashaar) helped me with this small vertex shader problem.

So if you'd like to see how a fish swim movement can be projected onto a mesh then pls watch this gif.
the result goes to "world position offset"
Additionally you can copy paste the nodes into your material here

https://blueprintue.com/render/le52jgsn

a quick video how to have different impact sounds on different surface types.  #UE4 #unrealengine #gamedev also have a look at this alternative method to test for surface types  

also have a look at this alternative method to test for surface types  

I made a stroboscope shader with the help of a friend, Michael Mendelson.
Perhaps you'll need something like this. then here it is:

From time to time i will repost some stuff from my old blog here, simply bcs i find it still useful for myself today.
This is one of those posts

a facebook user asked how to recreate this effect in unreal.

i tried to make a mockup with one texture and a material that is additive.

This is the result

You can download the project here

in a recent lecture i just covered reflective materials like glass and water again.

Water

since my last approaches were too complicated i tried to make the water material as easy as possible. sure it is then limited in its features, but it looks ok and has around ~350 instructions. the biggest problem might be, that there won't be any depth fade for intersections with this method. and obviously no volumetric depth which is not possible currently anyway as far as i know. pls comment if i am wrong on this one.

The Material Instance was modified this way 

download the normalmap here

this water looks ok with planar reflections as also with a box reflection capture

box reflection

planar reflection

Glass

glas works pretty much the same as water but without the animations. also it has a switch for the use of a glass surface normal.

the material instance was modified like this

planar reflection

sphere reflection capture

conclusion

a limited feature set for reflective materials works great. even without the (superexpensive) technique of planar reflections.

if the glass doesnt use normalmaps and bent surfaces, it wouldnt even be necessary to refract.

for large refractive areas use the refraction mode "pixel normal offset" to reduce visual separation of geometry features.

about 10y ago i started my old blogspot site

http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com

pity the old.. it will stay where it belongs..
but now that we are so knee deep in the future, artstation wasn't having it anymore and created the blog of the future!!

so, that is now. blogger.com will basically become the cemetery of blog sites and artstation blog is already fabulous.

see all my coming blog stuff here on this platform!