The basics of reflection probes

A reflection probe captures an image of the world around it and stores it into a "cubemap" - a six-sided texture that can fill every side of a cube.

Each side of the texture is square, and of the same resolution. This means a "512" resolution probe is six 512x512 textures, compacted together. This takes up 2MB of space and 2MB of memory.

Reflection probes also store lower-resolution versions of their textures. These lower-resolution copies are blurred, and allow for the representation of rough or uneven surfaces realistically.

As objects are rendered in the scene, they will be asking Unity "what reflection probe am I in?". Unity will provide them the texture and location of the two closest probes to their anchor position, and the shader will blend between them. If only one probe is available, Unity only will send one.

In addition to reflection probe objects, each scene has an "environment reflection", which is provided when no reflection probes are nearby. This is typically generated from the skybox material, but can be overridden manually.

An example of a reflection probe texture

In this image, you can see the contents of a reflection probe. Typically, reflection probes are stored uncompressed with all their faces laid out like this, but Unity will automatically combine them when importing them or any other cubemap texture laid out the same way. You can see that the probe in this example contains a building, a sky above, and an exterior area. Even though the probe is only 512 pixels on each side, it is still pretty sharp and contains a reflection that looks accurate and sharp in realtime.