Fun With Skybox’s in Unity

This article will focus on manipulating the Skybox in Unity from scratch.

First we need to create the material to be used in the skybox. Create a new material, and select “Skybox” as a shader.

The skybox material requires 6 objects to be dragged in the correct order. If we think like we are in a cube, there will be 6 different sides in our view. Thus, we need to add them respectively, in the correct order.

You will notice that the material’s preview on the bottom gets updated simultaneously. This actually gives us the opportunity to check if we have done any mistake while dropping the correct files.

To update the game with our new skybox material, we need to change the skybox material.

For Unity 2020, we can simply reach to this setting by clicking Window — Rendering — Lightning

On the lightning window, click on “Environment” and simply drag and drop the new skybox material.

And that’s it. We have successfully created a skybox material and updated the game. As we change the skybox settings with the new material, we can observe that objects in the scene view will be updated immediately.

I was actually surprised to find out that we can easily manipulate environments with changing the environment lightning Source settings. By default, we will leave it as it is, as “SkyBox”. Skybox, setting uses the colors provided by the Skybox material. Just can be seen above, the environment changed from a sunny noon to a night with limited light.

Gradient and color are the 2 other settings that we can set the Source setting. Gradient allows us to choose different colors for sky, horizon and ground; whereas color setting uses a single color for the all lightning.

It is really useful to know that we can set the Source setting to Color and select a colour of our desire to create an in-door environment effect, just as below.

Intensity multiplier is basicly the brightness of the light. If we increase it, you will realize that scene becomes brighter.