In real-time interactive content like video games, objects often seem to be floating.

As objects come in contact to the ground, they seem to “not touch” or float above the ground.

So why does this matter?  If you were trying to achieve realism this is an instant reality-breaker that we are hard-wired to spot in an instant. If you see the feet of a chair not attached to the ground, it's an immediate queue saying  “what you see is not real”. 

On the other hand, however if this small shadow is present, our eyes are fooled into believing that the object is actually here.

This effect is especially pronounced when in VR goggles. You truly believe the chair is actually in front of you, it’s quite staggering.

So here are three ways to deal with this issue.

• Static GI
  • Bake Lightmass
  • Bake GPU lightmass
  • AO texture Baking
• Dynamic GI 
  • Distance field AO
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Raytracing
• Hybrid 
  • Vertex Baked AO
  • 3DSmax
  • AO baker

In this Unreal engine tutorial, I explain how to create a very realistic chrome material.

The benefits of this method are twofold: 1- you can easily give a patina, a sort of ageing effect. 2 - you can go extremely detailed by using 8K textures.

Depending on the size of the texture in the scene, or if you used 16k images, the level of detail you are then working at is literally microscopic ! In the video below, I show you how doing this in real time gives you incredible amount of control over the fine tweaking.

In order to achieve this material just do the following :

1. Create a material
2. Set Metallic on 1
3. Add an 8k "imperfection" texture map as Roughness
   The texture should be uneven mid grey like a grunge map, but avoid high contrast with extreme blacks and whites.
4. Create a multiply node and a Scalar Node and multiply the texture to be able to tweak it in realtime
   
   ^{to zoom in the image, right click + open the image in new tab}
5. Optionally, you...

In this video I'll show you how to create a skydome in Unreal so you can :

• Load any High resolution HDRI as a viewport background
• Change the intensity 
• Rotate the background image