Reflections in Unity
Verbatim extracts from https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b52f Reflections Reflection Source By default, objects in a scene are rendered using Unity’s ‘Standard Shader’. The Standard Shader is a 'physically based shader' (PBS). This attempts to accurately represent the behavior of light on materials by mimicking physical properties such as reflectivity and the principles of ‘energy conservation’ which exist in the real world. When using the Standard Shader, every material has a degree of reflectivity based on its ‘specularity’, or ‘metalness’. Without hardware powerful enough to ray trace reflections in realtime we have to rely on pre-rendering reflections. We do this with a cubemap - a 6-sided image of the world derived either from the sky, or from a ‘Reflection Probe’ which renders the environment from a specific point in space, writing the results to a texture. This is then blended with other lighting and surf...