Screen Space Reflection

The Screen Space Reflection effect creates subtle reflections that simulate wet floor surfaces or puddles. This technique produces lower quality reflections than using Reflection ProbesA rendering component that captures a spherical view of its surroundings in all directions, rather like a camera. The captured image is then stored as a Cubemap that can be used by objects with reflective materials. More info
See in Glossary or planar reflections, which create perfectly smooth reflections. Screen Space Reflection is an ideal effect to limit the amount of specular light leaking.

The Screen Space Reflection effect is tuned for performance over quality to make it ideal for Projects running on current-gen consoles and desktop computers. It’s not suitable for mobile development. Because it relies on the Normals G-Buffer, it is only available in the deferred rendering path.

Screen Space Reflection creates more detailed reflections than other methods such as CubemapsA collection of six square textures that can represent the reflections in an environment or the skybox drawn behind your geometry. The six squares form the faces of an imaginary cube that surrounds an object; each face represents the view along the directions of the world axes (up, down, left, right, forward and back). More info
See in Glossary or Reflection Probes, because GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
See in Glossary using Cubemaps for reflection cannot self-reflect, and Reflection Probe reflections are limited in their accuracy.

For more information on how to use Screen Space Reflections in Unity, refer to the Screen Space Reflections documentation in the Post ProcessingA process that improves product visuals by applying filters and effects before the image appears on screen. You can use post-processing effects to simulate physical camera and film properties, for example Bloom and Depth of Field. More info
See in Glossary package.

• 2019–05–07 Page published with editorial review

• New feature in 5.6