Create

realistic
Environments
in
Blender

Chapter // 02
Lesson // 13

Course by Rob Tuytel

Documentation by Erik Selin
Blender 2.8x Environment course // C2 L13

Reflection cube maps, HDRI images and irradiance volumes

In this lesson, we will inspect Eevees lighting and reflection options. Since Eevee is a raster-based
engine, we can’t rely on rays bouncing around in our scene. We need to capture the environment in
some other way. This is where light probes and irradiance volumes come in.

Let’s begin by looking at reflection cube maps. To add a reflection cube map go to “Add->Light probe-
>Reflection cube map” You can also use “Shift+A” to bring up the add menu.

A reflection cube map will capture the reflections in its

area of influence. The information captured can be
used together with screen space reflection to create a
more accurate reflection on the objects in our scene.

After we add the reflection probe, we can scale it to fit

our scene. To have the probe capture reflections we go
to the render tab and find the indirect light section.
Here we press “Bake indirect light”.

For our scene, this will be completed fairly quickly. But

once a scene becomes more and more complex, it may
take a fair bit of time to complete this process.

Currently, we only have a gray background in our scene.

That is not much to reflect. To make the reflections
more interesting, we will use an HDRI image. HDRI
stands for high dynamic range image and is an image
with color values many times greater than white.

This means that we can use these images, not only as a surrounding background but for lighting a
scene. Keep in mind that HDRIs are not ideal for lighting with Eevee since Eevee does not have
support for shadows coming from light from an hdri. But for reflections they work fine.

Go to the world material tab. This is the red globe icon

in the properties panel. Next to the color, press the
circle icon and choose “Environment texture”.

A few new fields show up. At this stage, we need a hdri

image. Grab one from the lesson assets or download
directly from hdrihaven.com.

Click the “open” button and browse for the hdri image.
We can lower the strength value to something like 0.3
to have less light come from the hdri and avoid light
that doesn’t add to our shadows.

Back in the render settings under the indirect light tab

we can delete the bake and bake again.

// 2
Next we will look at the irradiance volume. We add it the same
way as the reflection probe. “Shift+A->Light probes->Irradiance
volume”.

This time we get a box with small dots placed in a grid inside the
box. These dots are points that will capture indirect light during
the same baking process as the reflection probe.

It is important that none of the dots are inside one of our dice
or we may get artifacts. Also, no dots should be below the floor
plane.

Delete the light cache once again and bake again. Now our scene
has something to reflect and probes to capture both the
reflections and indirect light.

// 3