Unity global illumination: specular occlusion for baked GI

One of the biggest issues with baked GI for SRP is specular occlusion. This is especially the case with bigger scenes. Currently a completed GI bake without careful reflection probe placement looks worse than no GI.
In built-in, you can enable SSR and it somewhat solves/lessens the issue with some caveats.
In HDRP and URP this is unfortunately not the case.

The difference between a GI bake with and without specular occlusion is quite massive from the visual side of things, and quality of life/time saved from placing reflection probes everywhere.
I do know HDRP offers some specular occlusion features, but it doesn’t solve the issue, there usually is quite a bit of occlusion left, you still need reflection probes.

For more info and comparisons you can view this thread: Specular Occlusion? - Unity Forum


How HDRP baked GI looks vs custom shadergraph shader with exposure based specular occlusion

Hi,
With the new adapative probe volume system we can adapt luminance spatially for reflection probe and limit light leaking. Option discuss in this thread: Adaptive Probe Volumes (APVs) experimental release for HDRP in 2021.2 page-4#post-8040509