Reflection Probes in Unity

Optimized reflections at the cost of accuracy.

Reflection Probes

A reflection probe captures the surrounding area of the environment in a cubemap. They are cheap reflections that are meant for low-end games and platforms. They can either make your scene look better or worse, so let's dive in.

Creating a Reflection Probe

Go to GameObjects > Lights > Reflection Probe.

A reflective sphere will show indicating that you have created a reflection probe.

It’s inside of a box similar to a trigger collider box.

The box indicates the area that it will acquire data to reflect off of. You want to scale it to fit around a room. Having the reflection probe selected, in the inspector, hit the “Edit Bound Volume” button.

Now we need to adjust the box to fit perfectly within the walls surrounding the room.

You will know when you are inside the wall when the yellow color disappears. It will give you the best reflective outcome for your scene when using reflection probes.

Next, we can adjust the intensity of the probe to get the feel and look we want!

On the image above, I am turning off and on my reflection probe. I have an intensity of 0.4 to barely reflect off from the environment. It gives a subtle reflection with light bouncing off to dark areas, and it also bounces off color from the lights and objects to surfaces.

For me, it enhanced my scene while messing with the settings in the inspector. For you, it might not work! They are a hit or miss so don’t be discouraged if it did not help your scene.

Gabriel