Chris Campbell · Lead Lighting Artist

The cubemap or the environment probe is the absolute fundamental part of our lighting workflow. Without it, we've just got basically a pitch black interior. It's pitch black because it's all interior and hidden away using vis areas and stuff, which basically means that you start from absolutely zero lighting. And what an environment probe does is you place kind of like an area of effect. In this case, these are all kind of cubes with a little bit of softness on them. And what they do is they capture what's called a cubemap, which is just a texture which is captured from, imagine that each one of these has a little camera pointed in all six directions of the cube. It takes a screenshot and then reprojects that ambient light into all four directions. So the more that you have, theoretically, the more detail you can get in your ambient lighting. These are generally approximations. So for example, on this side of this bed over here, it's actually receiving the light from this cubemap. So if I turn that one off, then it gets more lighting from this cubemap and vice versa.