Is the best way to have reflective water in an open world to have a handful of reflection probes? My world is already split into chunks, so putting a reflection probe in each chunk is doable.
Originally I thought I could just have a massive reflection probe covering the entire world, but of course this is not at all how reflection probes work. Also, I’ve made sure to not use box projection.
Is there a better solution that just using a bunch of reflection probes?
Real-time reflections or Screen Space reflections.
Apparently SSR isn’t great for water… how does real time reflections work? Isn’t that just reflection probes updating per frame / every X frames?
My issue is how to arrange the probes
Realtime reflection for water is a separate camera, in the old days Unity had a prefab for that and I am sure you will find something. Planar Reflection - Probes?
It’s planar reflection. Keep in mind that reflection probes use 6 cameras, for flat reflections only one is required.
SSR I think works nice with water, especially if it is a bit wavy, you have to play with the settings though. But it also depends on the use case, if you have many objects off-screen then it will fail.
My understanding is that reflection probes are meant to be used this way- where there are multiple probes and each one covers a small area.
I’d say planar reflections are the way to go, but these aren’t built in in Unity.
You indeed use a camera that is reflected in the plane of the water. Note that any backface culling also needs to be reversed for this camera. To solve this, you can also mirror the projection matrix. (And basically render the reflected camera upside down.) You’ll need a shader that handles this final transformation, but if you want to add the effect of a waves on the water you’ll need that anyway.