Reflection probes come in three basic types as chosen by the Type property in the inspectorA Unity window that displays information about the currently selected GameObject, asset or project settings, allowing you to inspect and edit the values. More info
See in Glossary (see the component reference page for further details).
The three types are explained in detail below.
A Baked Reflection Probe is one whose reflection cubemap is captured in the Unity editor and stored for subsequent usage in the player (see the Reflection Probes Introduction for further information). Once the capture process is complete, the reflections are “frozen” and so baked probes can’t react to runtime changes in the scene caused by moving objects. However, they come with a much lower processing overhead than Realtime Probes (which do react to changes) and are acceptable for many purposes. For example, if there is only a single moving reflective object then it need only reflect its static surroundings.
By default, Custom probes work the same way as Baked probes but they also have additional options that change this behaviour.
The Dynamic Objects property on a custom probe’s inspector allows objects that are not marked as Reflection Probe Static to be included in the reflection cubemap.
Note: The positions of these objects are still “frozen” in the reflection at the time of baking.
The Cubemap property allows you to assign your own cubemap to the probe and therefore make it completely independent of what it can “see” from its view point. You could use this, say, to set a skyboxA special type of Material used to represent skies. Usually six-sided. More info
See in Glossary or a cubemap generated from your 3D modelling app as the source for reflections.
Baked probes are useful for many purposes and have good runtime performance but they have the disadvantage of not updating live within the player. This means that objects can move around in the scene without their reflections moving along with them. In cases where this is too limiting, you can use Realtime probes, which update the reflection cubemap at runtime. This effect comes with a higher processing overhead but offers greater realism.
In the editor, real-time probes have much the same workflow as baked probes, although they tend to render more quickly.
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