Reflection Probes · Precomputed Reflections
A cubemap baked from inside the scene, so polished materials reflect what is actually around them and not just the sky.
- Real-time 3D
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Technology
About the project
An HDRI environment already gives a polished material reflections, but always the same ones: the sky, never what is beside it. A reflection probe fixes that by photographing the real scene - a cube camera is placed at a point, its six faces are rendered to a cubemap, and that cubemap becomes the material's envMap.
Two details decide whether it reads well. The reflective meshes are hidden during the bake, or they photograph themselves carrying the previous pass's reflection and the effect feeds back. And the render target is half float with mipmaps, because the roughness filtering three builds on top reads that mip chain, and at eight bits a channel the highlights break up.
Changing environment forces a re-bake, and that is the third problem: a standard material cannot blend two cubemaps at once, so going from one to the other reads as a jump. The demo crosses it by duplicating the mesh - a transparent ghost holding the old reflection, fading out over the new one.
What it does
- A side-by-side comparison: with the probe and without
- Works on any shape and any environment
- A half-float cubemap, so the highlights hold together
- A ghost-mesh cross-fade when the environment changes
- Platform
- Web (desktop and mobile)
- Stack
- Three.js · R3F · GSAP
- Type
- Rendering lab
Gallery
With the probe on: the coloured blocks show up in the reflection
The same scene with the probe off: the sphere reflects only the environment
The same probe on a torus knot
The environment switched to a forest, with the reflection re-baked