How to Use Reflection Planes in Blender

Creating accurate planar reflections in Blender is essential for rendering realistic flat surfaces like mirrors, glass panes, and polished floors in the EEVEE render engine. While Cycles handles reflections through path tracing automatically, EEVEE relies on Light Probes to calculate sharp, accurate planar reflections without heavy performance costs. This guide outlines the exact steps to create a mirror material, add and position a Reflection Plane probe, and adjust its parameters for clean reflection results.

Step 1: Create the Mirror Material

  1. Select the mesh object intended to be the mirror.
  2. Open the Material Properties tab and click New.
  3. In the Principled BSDF shader, set Base Color to pure white (#FFFFFF).
  4. Set Metallic to 1.0.
  5. Set Roughness to 0.0.

Step 2: Add a Reflection Plane Light Probe

  1. Place the 3D cursor on the surface of the mirror object by selecting a face in Edit Mode and pressing Shift + S > Cursor to Selected.
  2. Return to Object Mode.
  3. Press Shift + A and navigate to Light Probe > Reflection Plane.

Step 3: Align the Reflection Plane

  1. Scale and position the Reflection Plane so that it covers the entire surface area of the mirror.
  2. Ensure the normal direction (indicated by the single arrow protruding from the center of the plane) points outward in the direction the mirror faces.
  3. Keep the plane as close to the mirror mesh surface as possible without intersecting it to prevent visual clipping or dark artifacts.

Step 4: Configure the Reflection Plane Properties

  1. Select the Reflection Plane and navigate to the Probe Properties tab in the Properties editor.
  2. Distance: Adjust the capture distance to define how far objects in front of the mirror will be reflected.
  3. Falloff: Set the falloff margin to control how smoothly the reflection blends at the edges of the probe boundary.
  4. Clipping Offset: If geometry z-fighting or black artifacts appear, slightly increase the offset value to move the capture origin forward.

Step 5: Enable Render Settings (EEVEE Legacy / Standard)

If you are using Blender versions prior to Blender 4.2:

  1. Go to the Render Properties panel.
  2. Ensure the render engine is set to EEVEE.
  3. Check the box for Screen Space Reflections.
  4. Expand the Screen Space Reflections dropdown and check Refraction if viewing through glass, and uncheck Half Res Trace to maximize reflection clarity.