Unity Development Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. 3D Graphics

Unity has become increasingly well-known for the visual quality of its rendering engine, and a huge part of that is due to the flexibility it offers artists. In this chapter, we’ll take a close look at materials, shaders, and lighting, and how you can build your own effects that suit the unique look of your game.

Tip

We strongly recommend also reviewing the recipes in Chapter 5 for more complete coverage of graphics topics.

6.1 Creating a Simple Material

Problem

You want to customize the appearance of the surface of a 3D object by creating a material.

Solution

In this recipe, we’ll customize a simple shape, though the steps apply to most other meshes you’ll end up using in your game:

1. Create a new sphere by opening the GameObject menu and choosing 3D Object → Sphere.

2. Open the Assets menu, and choose Create → Material. Name it whatever you like.

3. Select the new material, and configure its colors (Figure 6-1).

4. Drag and drop the material onto the sphere.

Figure 6-1. The Inspector for a material showing the configurable properties for the default Standard shader

Discussion

Materials are essential to controlling the appearance of objects in your scene. Materials work by combining a shader, which is a program that computes the final color of each pixel that makes up an object, with properties, which are inputs delivered to the shader that are combined ...