I’m literally loving the new reflection probes of Unity 5 and how much they enhance the visuals…
However i’ve noticed that it’s a bit hard to make perfect reflections… with that i means that the reflections are often not perfectly specular to the objects theirself…
In Unreal Engine 4 you just need to put the reflection probe… and all the reflection are just specular as you expected… but in Unity 5,if you move the reflection probes the reflection moves too… and i don’t think it should happens…
I guess that’s why i haven’t seen a mirror with proper reflections yet! Usually the reflections are shifted or a bit far away.
Of course checking box projection and spent some time to find the best place to put the reflection probes can improve a lot the result but still it’s almost impossible to get “clear and not shifted reflections” without noticeable inconsistents.
This is just a screenshot as example(but i’ve TONS of example exactly identical to this one)
So as you can see the reflection is everything except that “perfectly specular”… and i can move around the probe when i want but it’s almost impossible to get a better result then that.
Ah… of course i’ve already set the volume of the reflection probe according to the volume of the room.
I think that the reflection probes as they’re know are more useful to reflect lights in general but they’re not so good on materials with the maximum on smothness.
There are some chances to have improved reflection probes to make perfectly specular reflection in the next updates or i’m doing something wrong??
You can’t have a flat mirror reflection from a reflection probe.
Your floor is a plane, the probe is a point. Like you wrote you can move around that point a bit to get a better result and it does the same what you would have done in 4 in almost realtime for you.
Also -and I’m not exactly sure how this works - it can blend between several probes so that might lead to some blurriness. Other factors for that are reflection probe resolution and the bump of your surface.
If you want a flat mirror reflection you’ll have to use a script, just like in 4.
Well… also if i can’t get exactly a mirror effect… i hope we’ll be able to achieve something similar to Unreal Engine 4. I’m not expecting to necessarely have “mirror effect” but that the reflection probe doesn’t make the reflection perfectly specular is a problem… If i want even some “blurry” reflection so not perfectly like a mirror… but still visibile,i do not want that those reflection are so much shifted.
Right now the reflection probe is useful just to make reflection that aren’t really distinguible,but i hope we’ll have also another reflection probe that will achieve result similar to UE4.
As I understand it there are screen space reflections underway and I think there is a good chance that you can reuse mirror scripts from Unity 4. No guarantee, though.
Also doing a quick test according to the method outlined in the link above I get correct, sharp reflections when using reflection probes. Use box projection for the probe, choose realtime reflections or a high enough resolution when baking, no blending between lightmaps for the object in question and place the probe at the mirrored position of your camera. Have a accordingly smooth surface for the floor or whatever is supposed to be the mirror. (Both in smoothness and normal. )