Accurate Reflections?

Unity Engine
1

I am using U5 Pro, and I have found that reflection probes do not give an accurate reflection in global space.
I found that when I move the camera from its starting position, the perspective of the reflection is not recalculated, and remains in its original position, how would I change this to give a truly realistic reflection for close objects?

2

First, parent your reflection probe to your camera. change the setting in the probe to update every frame with no time slicing. To get a more detailed look, turn up the resolution too.

1 Like
3

I had set it to every frame with no slicing already with a high res, but still the same.

4

Are you sure the Reflection probe is parented to your camera? If it is then If you could show a screen shot of your settings and scene that may be helpful.

5

Yes it is. Essentially I am getting the same perspective results that happen with a cubemap, the reflection on a cube on the floor do not match up with the floor, they appear to be much further down.

6

Why would putting the reflection probe in the same place as the main camera give accurate reflections? That doesn’t even make sense in theory, why would you expect it to work in practice?

7

Cubemap reflection probes are designed to simulated reflections from a point in space and therefore are not suitable or accurate for all scenarios, if you have a flat surface for example you may want to create mirror type reflection rather than a cubemap with box projection. Here is a guide to a current workaround which does that but still uses the standard shader and reflection probes:

If you are using 4.x then try: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/MirrorReflection4 otherwise we hope to have screenspace reflections at some point and an update for that mirror reflection to work with PBR etc in 5.x. There is further discussion here which may help:

8

I found the probes a little buggy at first. When I baked it then switched to boxed and/or then checked HDR, it wouldn’t work right. I brought a new one in and set it up then baked it and it worked fine. I think that was my first try, I haven’t had any trouble since then. This thread was helpful…

9

@OllyNicholson Yes, this is the kind of effect I am looking for, is the hack found at Realtime reflections in Unity 5 | TwiiK.net efficient for major use? I am looking to add this to quite a few things.

Also, is there no built-in way to get this kind of effect, I was under the impression that this was exactly what Reflection Probes were for.

10

@ - I’ve not tried it myself, best way to find out is try it and profile it :slight_smile: alternatively look at the water script from the pro water package to see how the cameras and reflections are set up. I believe we are working on integrating this with our PBS / reflection probe tech