Environment Probe

• Box Projection — works better for indoor scenes (when the room has a 3D box shape) or box-shaped outdoor scenes (back alley between buildings).
• Sphere Projection — works better for spherical-shape cases.
• Raymarching — works for all other cases, the probe renders reflections taking various shapes of surrounding surfaces into account. Lighting is calculated using physically-correct formulas ensuring that reflections as well as diffuse lighting become more realistic in comparison with Box and Sphere projections, and consequently more resource-consuming.

Sets the light color multiplier, which provides fine control over color intensity of the emitted light:

• The minimum value of 1 corresponds to the least saturated light color.
• The maximum value of 100 equals the most bright and intense color.

Enables the influence of sun light color on Environment Probe.

• Sphere Projection - this type uses a spherical approximation to calculate secondary light bounces. It offers significantly higher performance than Raymarching and allows you to avoid noise in the secondary bounce.
• Raymarching - this type calculates secondary light bounces by tracing rays through the scene. While this method is more physically correct, it has low performance and introduces noise into the secondary bounce.

Allows selecting the cubemap to be used for the last raymarching step:

• Environment Probe — the cubemap used for the last step is the same as for all previous steps.
• Only Sky — the cubemap contains the sky and clouds only. This option is designed to fix the incorrect parallax that may occur in reflections due to the infinite length of the last step.

Specifies if the reflection is updated in realtime or baked into a texture.

Cubemap update interval:

• 1 — Refresh only one face every frame.
• 2 — Refresh two faces every frame.
• 3 — Refresh three faces every frame.
• 4 — Refresh four faces every frame.
• 5 — Refresh five faces every frame.
• 6 — Refresh all six faces every frame.

Resolution of the reflection texture, in pixels.

The quality of mipmaps for environment reflections on rough surfaces. Quality modes differ in the number of rays used to create a reflection on a rough surface.

Global distance multiplier within the range of [0.0f; 1.0f] for the reflection LODs visibility distance. Distance Scale is applied to the distance measured from the reflection camera to the node (surface) bound.

Intensity of the environment ambient lighting.

Intensity of the environment reflection.

Distance to the far clipping plane for image grabbing.

Cut out sky rendering in Environment Probe and renders dynamic reflection instead of the sky.

Enable local space (local coordinates) for Environment Probe. Can be used for scenes with moving objects.

Cubemap texture for reflection.

Enables clipping of reflections occluded by obstacles (located in shadowed areas relative to the light source). This feature uses the depth texture grabbed for Environment Probe to determine reflections that should be visible.

When enabled, the three parameters listed below (Bias, Normal Bias, and Depth Texture) are available.

Toggles conversion of the baked cubemap or realtime calculation to sRGB color space and modifying it to a lower dynamic range. Applying this option ensures correct linear gradient between the neighboring pixels in the probe and makes transition between extremely bright pixels and other pixels smoother. Visually improves low-resolution probes by making them less pixelated and makes bright or constant pixels less prominent.

This option modifies the cubemap, thus the state should remain unchanged after the cubemap for the static probe has been baked. If a static Environment Probe reuses a cubemap that has been baked with this option enabled, it should be enabled for this probe as well. Otherwise, the difference in brightness of light sources will be obvious.

This option may be combined with Cubic Filtering to achieve a better gradient between pixels.

Depth texture used for clipping reflections occluded by obstacles.

To grab the depth texture for clipping perform the following steps:

1. Place Environment Probe to the desired location and adjust its size, if necessary.
2. Disable all nodes that should not be taken into account when calculating occluded (shadowed) areas.
3. Enable the Cutout By Shadow feature and make sure that the Grab by Bake Lighting mode is also enabled.
4. Click Show Bake Lighting and in the window that appears click Bake Selected Probe.
5. After the textures are generated, you can enable or disable clipping at run time.