Removing skybox layer on camera makes reflections disappear on objects?

underlight · October 25, 2022, 9:00am

Steps to reproduce in the editor:

Create cubemap, prefilter it and assign to scene skybox
Create test object with shiny material
Remove skybox layer from camera
Launch

Removing skybox layer is import for experiences with transparent canvas like AR, etc

Leonidas · October 25, 2022, 11:23am

Hi @underlight,

There is a feature request about this behavior in the engine repo, together with a current workaround:

github.com/playcanvas/engine

Make it possible to disable skybox rendering

opened 04:12PM - 16 Apr 21 UTC

slimbuck

enhancement area: graphics

It is currently not possible to set the prefiltered lighting data on the scene w…ithout also having the skybox render on the background. You can achieve this by disabling the layer: ```javascript this.camera.camera.layers = this.camera.camera.layers.filter((l) => { return l !== pc.LAYERID_SKYBOX; }); ``` However this will still cause meshes and shaders to be created for the skybox unnecessarily. Add an option to the scene to not automatically fallback to prefiltered cubemap for the skydome. See https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/blob/master/src/scene/scene.js#L388

yaustar · October 25, 2022, 11:44am

CC @slimbuck

slimbuck · October 25, 2022, 12:50pm

This should have been fixed in Fix cubeMapRotation uniform by slimbuck · Pull Request #4748 · playcanvas/engine · GitHub, which will be available in the next minor engine release.

To test this fixes your issue, please try running your app with:
?use_local_engine=https://code.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-latest.js

Thanks!

underlight · October 25, 2022, 5:23pm

Thank you for quick response guys!

@yaustar @slimbuck yep, using latest engine fixes the issue. How do I enforce this engine version for playcanvas hosted builds though?

yaustar · October 25, 2022, 5:36pm

At the moment, you can’t use the latest engine build (it’s also considered to be unstable as it’s not been tested).

We are thinking about doing a release for 1.58.0 as preview in the near future.

If you need this now for playcanv.as hosted builds, you/we could build a custom 1.57 version of the engine with just this fix and have it directly in the project. The downside is that it will add another 400KB of download and code to the build.

When you self hosting, you can just do a swap out of the engine file after downloading the build.

underlight · October 25, 2022, 6:28pm

Thanks @yaustar
No need for custom engine build for now, I’m currently doing a dirty workaround in code (having skybox layer enabled by default and then removing it from camera 500ms after initialize still solves my issue). Can we expect 1.58 somewhat next week?

yaustar · October 25, 2022, 7:00pm

@slimbuck @mvaligursky will know more of the schedule for the engine release plan

slimbuck · October 25, 2022, 9:01pm

Yep we’ll try to a minor release this week or early next week (depending on how testing goes)