Day 66: Reflective Probes vs. Screen Space Reflections in Unity

Objective: Deciding which to use, Reflective Probes or Screen Space Reflections.

To start off we will look at reflection probes. Reflection probes are the cheaper route of the two. So if you are planning a game for mobile, it’ll be encouraged to use this path.

We start by creating a Reflection probe.

Once’s it’s created you will need to edit the boundaries to cover the area that you would want the reflection to be on.

For this scene, we want the reflection to happen on the marble floor so we covered it with the boundaries.

I added a light to help see a little better.

Now for Screen Space Reflection.

To use Screen Space Reflection, we will need to create a Empty game object and add a post processing volume component to it. We will add the screen space reflections effect to this volume.

Make sure on your main camera you add a PostProcessingLayer as well and create a layer for the main camera and Volume object as well.

Once this is done, you may have to play with the settings for the effect to get your desired look.

Screen Space Reflections is usually used more for PC and Console games due to it needing more resources to run smoothly.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day!