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Guide for beginners: What are Screen Space Reflections?

Screen Space Reflections is a technique (very important in 3D configurator projects) for reusing screen space data to calculate reflections. It is often used to generate more subtle reflections e.g. on wet floor surfaces or in puddles. Since it works entirely within the screen area, it can only reflect what is currently on the screen (no backface reflection, no object living outside the screen).

Screen Space Reflection is an expensive technique, but can deliver good results when used correctly. It is only available in the delayed rendering path as it is based on the Normals G buffer.

The current implementation of screen space reflections in Unity is tuned for performance over quality to make it usable in production on current consoles and desktop computers. Be aware that this technique is not intended to produce perfectly smooth reflections, you should use probes or planar reflections from them. This effect is also very well suited to act as a reflective occlusion effect by limiting the amount of specular light emitted.

Properties.

Property Function
Default settings Quality requirements. Use Custom if you want to perform fine tuning.
Maximum number of iterations Maximum number of steps in the raymarching process. Higher values mean more reflections. Note: Available only with Custom preset.
Ray Thickness Ray Thickness. Low values are expensive, but reveal smaller details. Note: Available only with Custom preset.
Resolution Changes the size of the internal buffer. Downsample it to maximize performance or supersample it to get slow but higher quality results. Note: Available only with the “Custom” preset.
Maximum demo distance Maximum distance in the scene after which the drawing of reflections is finished.
Distance fade Hides reflections near the near plane. This is useful to hide common artifacts.
Vignette Hides reflections near the edges of the screen.

Services.

You should only use the user-defined default setting for beauty recordings. Do not go higher than Medium on consoles unless you have enough time for the video card, especially when working with Full HD resolutions. At lower resolutions, you can increase the quality target and get similar timings with a higher visual quality.

Known issues and limitations.

Screen Space Reflection Does Not Support AR/VR

Requirements.

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3DMaster