Environment Probe

Chapters:

Environment Probe is a light source which also provides reflections on an object inside the probe by using a cubemap (pre-baked or dynamically changing each frame). In Unigine, Environment Probes have two types of projections:

Box projection - works better for indoor scenes (when the room has a 3D box shape) or box-shaped outdoor scenes (back alley between buildings).
Spherical projection - works better for all other cases (reflections on car, spherical room, etc.).

With Environment Probes you can create reflections instead of creating reflection materials.

Notice

By default Environment Probes are used for reflections only, as for lighting, it is recommended to simulate it using Voxel Probes. This approach ensures the best result, however you can still use Environment Probe for ambient lighting.

Overview#

Environment Probe is a great thing to increase performance, decrease the number of materials and make the life of content designers easier.

Environment probes use cubemaps that were baked (or grabbed with a special tool). This cubemap will play the role of the reflection and the light simulation. Here is an example:

We have two houses with different color of the interior and put same objects (with reflection material, for example, metal) into these houses. What will happen?

If we don't speak about the dynamic reflections, you'll need to reflect the interior on each object. But interiors have different ambient color, and that is why you'll need to create 2 different materials for them. Not optimized at all.

Environment probes remove this flaw. Once you added an object, you don't think about the reflection material for it. The environment probe will map the cubemap to the object.

There is a difference in mapping cubemaps to transparent and non-transparent objects:

If an object is transparent, the environment probe will map the cubemap only if the entire object is inside the radius of the environment probe. Otherwise, the object won't be affected by the environment probe at all.
If an object is non-transparent, the environment probe will map the cubemap to any part of the object which is inside the radius of the probe.


Transparent object affected by environment probe	Non-transparent object affected by environment probe

If you put several environment probes that affect a non-transparent object (rendered in the deferred pass) their cubemaps will be blended smoothly. Here is an example, a long corridor which has walls painted in different colors.

We put two environment probes and both of them affect the object (when the object will be in the intercrossing area). When you have large locations, you should use several environment probes instead of one to make the final image more realistic.

The SSR (Screen Space Reflections) effect makes the final image more realistic, because it appends reflections that cannot be baked into cubemaps. Using environment probes and SSR is a great method for pretty fast imitation of reflections with dynamic lighting.

Multiple Environment Probes for Transparent Objects#

The Multiple Environment Probes option set for a transparent object (rendered in the forward pass) allows several environment probes affect the object and map their cubemaps to it.

When the option is disabled, only the last set environment probe will affect the object. At that the entire object must be inside the radius of the environment probe. Otherwise, it won't be affected by the enviroment probe at all.
When the option is enabled, the object will be lit by all of the environment probes: each probe will affect the part of the object, which is inside the probe. Cubemaps of the environment probes will be blended in the intercrossing areas.

NoticeRendering of Multiple Environment Probes must be enabled via Rendering -> Transparent -> Multiple Environment Probes.


Multiple Environment Probes is off: only the left cubemap is mapped to the object	Multiple Environment Probes is on: both cubemaps are mapped and blended

Adding Environment Probe#

To add an Environment Probe object to the scene via UnigineEditor, do the following:

Run the project with UnigineEditor.
On the Menu bar, click Create -> Light -> Environment Probe.
Place the environment probe.
Grab the cubemap texture for the environment probe. You can grab it in the Node tab of the Parameters window or you can bake lighting.
Adjust the environment probe settings.

Notice

You can't bake realtime lights (LightOmni, LightProj, etc.) to an environment probe. The best you can do is to place spheres with emission materials instead of lights, adjust emission intensity and then bake lighting. However, the result will look worse than you'd have with realtime lights.