Environment Probe

Environment Probe is a light source which also provide a reflection on object inside the probe by using cubemap (pre-baked or dynamically changing each frame). In Unigine, Environment Probes have two types of projections: spherical and box projection. Box projection mode is better to use in indoor scenes (when the room has a 3D box shape) or box-shaped outdoor scenes (back alley between buildings). For all other cases it's better to use spherical environment probe (reflections on car, spherical room, etc.).

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

Overview

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

Environment probes use cubemaps that were baked (or grabbed with 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. Environment probe will map the cubemap to the object.

If you put several environment probes 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 will affect the object (when the object will be in the intercrossing area). When you have large locations, you should use some 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.

Adding Evnironment Probe

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

Run 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 Light tab of the Environment Probe's node or you can grab it by using Grabber.
Adjust the environment probe settings.