From the course: Blender and Substance Painter: Architectural Visualization

Bonus lecture: Reflection Cubemaps in Eevee

From the course: Blender and Substance Painter: Architectural Visualization

Start my 1-month free trial

Bonus lecture: Reflection Cubemaps in Eevee

“

- [Instructor] Let's now take a look at another kind of light probe in Blender. I'm going to tumble around and let's go over to the kitchen area 'cause what I want to do is work on the reflections of the refrigerator and the coffee maker, and maybe even the faucet here. So, first of all, what let's do, let's bring the camera over to this view. I'll press control + alt + zero and that'll bring the camera here. I'll then hit the N key and go to view and lock camera to view and now we can arrange this. Maybe I'd like the view to be a little bit wider angle, so I'm going to scroll or twirl these up and go down to the camera here and in the camera properties, I'm going to change the focal length from 35 to 30, let's try that. Yeah, something like that. All right, so here's our frame. I'll turn this off now and close that panel. Let's go over to the rendered view here and see how it looks. All right, so we can see some reflections in here but not, not, not a lot, I mean, it's kind of, we get a little bit on the floor and a little bit up here from one of the lights, but not much really. So, currently screen space reflections is on right here and that's what's helping us with the windows, but let's turn that off for now. And when we turn that off, we get really no reflections at all. So what we can do if we press shift + A, we've got this reflection cube map, and that's what we're going to use, I'm going to select the refrigerator here and then I'm going to press shift + S + 2 to move the cursor there and then shift + A and light probe reflection cube map. What we can do now is go ahead and bake the indirect lighting, so if we scroll down here, indirect lighting here and we choose bake cube map, let's try this, and hey, that's quite a difference, huh? Look at that. So now we get some pretty nice reflections from this. That's not too bad. Now what we can do is we can isolate it more for just that object, we can change the size, so if I come over here to the cube map data properties, I can change the size from sphere to box and there it is. Now let's go to the top view and wire frame and let's scale this in until it fits a little bit better and bring that in like this, and then bring it in in the Y here about like that, there we go. And then we can also bring it down so it's the proper size here in the z-axis as well, or at least a little bit closer. There we go. All right, so let's go back to our camera view and the rendered view. So there's our cube map for the refrigerator. Now let's create one for the coffee machine as well. We can go through the same process, we can press shift + A cube map, change it to a sphere and bring it down quite a bit now. Oh, I've still got my cursor over here, I should have moved the cursor to the coffee machine, but that's okay. let's try this, we can bring it up and get it the right size. All right, I'll hit zero and go back to the rendered view. Oh, we need to make this a little bit taller, don't we? Let me do that. Okay, there we go. Now let's bake this, I'll come over to here, bake cube map. All right, so now we've got our reflections here. Let's go ahead and render it and see how it looks, I'll hit F12. Yeah, that looks pretty good. So we're getting some reflections from the environment, from the lights and from other objects here. We could do the same thing with this faucet over here let's hit escape, select the faucet. You can see how it's kind of a dull material here. We can move the cursor to here, create a light probe, cube map, and then I'm going to move it up into here and scale it down quite a bit. So it's just around that faucet and then we can come over here and bake and there you go, so we can see quite a bit more reflections in there. Let's go back to our camera with the zero key, hit F12 and see what we think. Yeah, there we go. Now, I want to point out, notice what's happened over here. Our windows are not transparent anymore. So, what we can do is come over back to the render properties and turn on screen space reflections, but when we do that, our reflections on the metal here aren't as crisp, aren't as clean, right? So if we hit F12 and take a look at this, this is what we get. Still not bad but not as clean as it was without screen space reflections. So, once again, a trade-off you're always kind of balancing what's important and what you want out of the render and prioritizing one over the other. So, that's how you use the reflection cube maps.

Contents