This is my first Unity project with baked lighting & reflection probes.
My room is rectangular, with 2 windows. There are also lower walls that separate off a kitchen and bathroom area.
Both kitchen and bathroom have a mirror with a reflection probe. In both cases the reflection probe seems to be able to look over the separating walls.
I’m not sure what it is that I’m doing wrong. All walls are static & have baked light. For now, the scene only has 4 lights : 3 baked area lights, and a baked sun.
I have 1 ‘global’ reflection probe that covers the entire space (importance = 1) + 1 refl probe near both mirrors (importance = 2).
As you can see in the images below, the reflection probe in the kitchen seems to display correctly in-editor. However, in-game (in-editor, not a full build), the reflection shows the window that is behind the separating walls.
Any help would be very much appreciated !
Thanks !
This is in the Universal Render Pipeline? After some testing I think this happens because the reflecting object is very close to the boundary of the reflection box, which means that it will only contribute very little to the reflection, despite its higher importance. There are two ways to solve it (that I can think of right now):
Reduce the “Blend Distance” of the Reflection Probe, so that it will have a stronger effect near its boundary. However, this will also make the transition more abrupt if a reflecting object leaves the box.
Extend the box into the wall so that the mirror is at least as far inside the boundary as the Blend Distance. If nothing is on the other side of the wall, that’s probably the better solution, as it allows a smooth transition between the probes.
Thank you for your help !
(I have used your 2nd suggestion)
The more I try and understand reflection probes, the less I actually do.
What I understood from the documentation for 2022.3 (and I must be misunderstanding it), is that the bounding box determines what objects will be using that particular reflection. I also (mis ?)understood that the probe’s sphere determines where the reflections will be generated from, and that it can even be located outside the BB (but that doesn’t seem to be true when you try it in the editor). I seem to also remember reading that the blend distance is only for deferred rendering … so it should do much in my case (URP, which is forward by default, I think ?)
Pfff, what a pain.
That’s pretty much it, as far as I’m aware, so I don’t think you really misunderstood. Except that the Reflection Probe can’t be outside the box, but you already figured that out. However, you can provide a custom cube map, which can also come from a different Reflection Probe.
I was wondering about that as well, and in the Built-In Render Pipeline it doesn’t seem to do anything, but in URP, it does. The general Unity documentation was written for the Built-In pipeline, and not everything in it can be applied to URP/HDRP.
I’m still not entirely sure how to reliably set up reflection probes though … A bit hit and miss for now.
At one point, I thought the objects’ bounding boxes had to be completely encased in the probe’s bounding box for it to have an effect, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (as I noticed on the floor, for instance).
