Is it possible to use the Skybox material as the environment map for reflective materials? Ideally this would also work with the PBR pipeline. My understanding is that currently only a TextureCube resource can be used - and in the case of PBR, only the texture cube associated with the Zone is used.
My goals is just interact with the Skybox material (say, something like this):
For instance, in the “ForwardDepth” render path, it looks like the viewport is being sampled for a pass called “Refract”. I don’t know what that does, but it seems close-ish to what I’m after…
<renderpath>
<rendertarget name="depth" sizedivisor="1 1" format="lineardepth" />
<command type="clear" color="1 1 1 1" depth="1.0" stencil="0" output="depth" />
<command type="scenepass" pass="depth" output="depth" />
<command type="clear" color="fog" depth="1.0" stencil="0" />
<command type="scenepass" pass="base" vertexlights="true" metadata="base" />
<command type="forwardlights" pass="light" />
<command type="scenepass" pass="postopaque" />
<command type="scenepass" pass="refract">
<texture unit="environment" name="viewport" />
</command>
<command type="scenepass" pass="alpha" vertexlights="true" sort="backtofront" metadata="alpha" />
<command type="scenepass" pass="postalpha" sort="backtofront" />
</renderpath>
Kind of getting the idea now…
So, rather than using some kind of screen space hack, I wrote a reflection probe component. This ties in beautifully with the existing PBR pipeline. Check it out:
Nice! Is there any slowdown it is hard to say from the video?
Nice! Is there any slowdown it is hard to say from the video?
I haven’t run the profile on this, but qualitatively, no noticeable performance hit. I’m using 1024 px^2 for each cube face, which might not be optimal on all platforms/hardware configs.
Also, I haven’t totally figured out the question of when to update the reflection probe. If nothing is changing, then it is overkill to update every from or even on a fixed update loop. Also, you might just want to have this in the editor and bake the probe to a texture on disk…For now, I’ve just implemented an Update() function that I have tied in to my specific use case.
I was thinking of doing a PR for this - would it be useful to anyone else?
Very
nice
For less-shiny (or smaller) objects you wouldn’t need as high a resolution since it gets blurred anyway, but this would still make the objects fit really nice into the environment.
And I guess it would need some interpolation to work well on moving objects?
Too much fun:
I’ve been pondering implementation of a reflection probe component for Urho3D (something like what you get builtin to Unity) So, I would love to see a PR for this, or at least a look at your code? I could help with testing and tweaks if you wanted to try and make a PR out of it.
Excellent. Thank you.
Sorry for bumping this conversation again a year later, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about fixing a reflection scaling issue when using this probe technique.
I’m using it to simulate mirrors in a scene, and while I can see that the technique can only ever be an approximation of a real reflection, I noticed that in Unity, the reflection probe has a option for “box projection” which seems to help a lot in making scale in reflections look more correct.
More info here:
So, I’m wondering about the feasibility of implementing something like this for Urho, but I’m feeling a bit out of my depth. Would this need some work at the shader level to implement?
