Working with Screen Space Reflections in Unity’s HDRP

Jared Amlin
4 min readJan 25, 2022

--

What makes Screen Space Reflections unique? For starters, they are accurate reflections. If you have ever worked with reflection probes, you know that while they can add general reflectivity to the scene, they are far from accurate. Screen Space Reflections provide those mirror like reflections that you would expect from a real environment. Another thing that makes these reflections unique is the cost associated with them. If you are making a mobile game, reflection probes are the inexpensive but inaccurate way to go. If you have the processing power that come with PC and console gaming, enjoy the beautiful mirrors that come with the expensive Screen Space Reflections.

To start using Screen Space Reflections, you need to make sure they are enabled on the HDRP Assets. Open the Project Settings and Then navigate to Quality>HDRP. Here you can toggle between the different HDRP assets and enable the Screen Space Reflections under Lighting>Reflections.

You should be able to find the HDRP Default Asset in Project>Assets>HDRP Default Resources.

Selecting the HDRP Asset will bring up it’s additional options in the inspector.

If you want to find the asset currently assigned to your project, go to the HDRP Default Settings in Project Settings. Clicking on the Asset in Asset with the default settings, will highlight it for you in the Assets folder.

I have a Global Volume in the scene to use for the post processing.

Screen Space Reflections can be added as an override. If you see this error, then you still need to enable the reflections in the HDRP

--

--

Jared Amlin

I am an artist and musician, that is currently diving headfirst into game development with C# and Unity3D.