Screen Space Reflections in Unity, and Why They are Unique!

addam davis
3 min readJul 1, 2022

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Objective: Understand and create screen space reflections in your scenes!

Screen Space Reflection is a technique for reusing screen space data to calculate reflections. In this tutorial we are going to create these hyper realistic reflections. To begin we need to reflection probes.

These reflection probes look a lot different in HDR pipeline than they did in in UR pipeline. With the probe selected make sure the type is set to realtime.

For this tutorial I want the reflection probe to fit the whole room, so select the top-down view and adjust the x, and z axis.

Now we need to switch the front view and adjust the y axis.

Most likely the biggest difference you’ll notice is you will get an inaccurate reflection on the walls.

This is because we don’t have Screen Space Reflections turned on yet. We also need to turn on Influence Volume.

This means it is only going to do a reflection probe of our current environment.

To get Screen Space Reflections working you need to go to your HD Render Pipeline Assets and turn it on. Under Lighting, go to reflections and turn it on.

This will make your reflections match. Now we want to adjust the amount of Screen Space Reflection because we are getting gaps in our textures. Go to Global Volume and add the override “Screen Space Reflection

Turn all on and you can adjust your reflections to fit your specific needs!

Don’t be afraid to experiment with your reflections and I’ll see you in the next tutorial!

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