here s another example of how the

[night birch]

The room is uniformly flooded with purple light so this looks mostly as expected to me
Since the previews is showing specular reflection, but the orb in the scene is not, that suggests to me that the reflection probes aren't working properly (assuming it's the same material)

The preview is rendered with no ambient light whatsover so it's not going to look like that with the probes

Using mixed lights in addition to the reflection probe might improve the specularity more

If that specular only look is what you want, you wouldn't use light probes at all, only reflection probes and mixed lights

[blissful smelt]

mhh I see

I've never realt with light probes before. I just know that things did not look like this before i set them up

[blissful smelt]

I have tried it in game. results are basically the same.

[night birch]

Tried what, in what scenario?

[blissful smelt]

I mean testing how it looks outside of unity.

[night birch]

A material's appearance always depends on what it's lit by

[blissful smelt]

I see

[night birch]

Lighting from light probes is very low resolution and never results in specular reflections, but it's the only way to render baked diffuse lighting on dynamic objects in a positional way

[blissful smelt]

I see

I did not know that

[night birch]

You're not getting any specular reflections likely you don't have a reflection probe, or it's not working properly

[blissful smelt]

I do have a reflection probe.

[night birch]

And if the lights are of type mixed instead of baked, they can cause specular reflections even without probes

[blissful smelt]

Yeah, I was trying to avoid that for performance reasons

[night birch]

Then it's worth looking into why we aren't seeing specular reflections from the reflection probe

I like to make a sphere with a smooth purely metallic material to test how reflections are working at a given point

[blissful smelt]

I believe it's the intensity of it

I ahve ti set to 0.5

because anything above that just makes the environment look terrible

[night birch]

How so?

[blissful smelt]

with the intensity low

with the intensity higher

it just completely covers the room in light reflection

[night birch]

This mainly happens when the surface materials' smoothness values are too high

so they're all too shiny

[blissful smelt]

damn that sucks

i did want the objects to have a glossy appearance.

turning down the smoothness removes that effects completely

I think I'll just stick to mixed lighting

[night birch]

Oh, I thought the glossiness was a problem
In that case turning down the reflection probe intensity could be a reasonable workaround

Though a fully reflective brightly lit room is an incredibly difficult scenario for realtime rendering in general

[blissful smelt]

oh wow hah. Picked something great for my first project, then.

[night birch]

You could also try to bake with ambient occlusion, I think it might tune down specularity in shadowed areas to make it look less weird

Though I'm not sure if it does that, or only adds diffuse shadows

[blissful smelt]

I do have baked AO

[night birch]

I guess it doesn't help much then
Another thing that might work is enabling box projection on the reflection probe, so the reflections are not projected at infinity

[blissful smelt]

yup, that's also something I've already tried hah

[night birch]

oof 💦

My last ditch efforts would be to enable mixed lighting and turn down the reflection probe, so you have specularity from lights, and a little bit from the environment too
or to give every texture sensible roughness and normal maps so they have some surface definition
Right now a big contributor to the odd look is that they're perfectly polished

And the reflections shown are very approximate, which is the best reflection probes can do

[blissful smelt]

yeah that would've been my next move.

I'd still have the unimportant light son baked only

[night birch]

Or third option to swap to ray-traced rendering to get perfectly accurate reflections and occlusion