Adding a Skybox

Objective: Create a custom Skybox.

The sky is more than just blue all the time, there are storms and it turns grey or night time and its dark, or even daybreak its orange. This article is going to go into how to set up the skybox in your game to simulate some of these and even how to add in a custom sky material.

First we’ll set up a new material called a Skybox and add it into our scene.

When creating a material for a Skybox be sure to select the Skybox shader. Then drag the material into your scene to use it.

Here I’ve set it to procedural, but I’ll cover the others a little later on. A procedural skybox is like the default skybox that comes in every scene. Just because it’s default though doesn’t mean that we can’t add some awesome effects!

There are a few more options in the skybox material shader to chose from. First we’ll look at the 6 Sided option

As you can see it adds 6 different areas to add textures. When they come together they will create one huge cube picture.

It helps that we put them in the correct order :).

Next we’ll take a look at the cubemap. This is set up similarly except that instead of us putting in the 6 sides individually, it comes in a single file that has 6 sides already mapped out.

There is only one thing to look at before we add it in. First we need to change the texture from a 2D Texture shape to a Cube.

Lastly we’ll take a look at the Panoramic skybox option. This is used to add a picturesque background to your scene.

Each of these have their purposes one isn’t necessarily better than the others. When choosing the one to use, use your best judgment as what a gamer would want to see, not just as what a developer can do.