How to Add a Custom Skybox using Unity

Markay Lucas
3 min readSep 7, 2022

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In my previous articles I have created a control room and added a universal pipeline to it. Now to take it a step further I will show you how I added a custom skybox to my project using unity. So a little background about procedural sky boxes. Unity is equipped with something called procedural skybox shader that has the capacity to generate a skybox without the need of input textures. So instead unity uses material inspectors which allows us to customize a standard project so to speak.

Here is how I installed my custom skybox:

  1. Go to project folder and create lighting settings, I then docked the light setting next to my inspector window. Next I made sure my lightmapping is set to progressive GPU and the auto generate is checked.

2. Right now I have a default skybox and need to adjust some settings. first under my project view I right clicked and scrolled down to materials and renamed it to skybox. next I opened a new folder and dropped that skybox folder in there. Next I dragged that skybox material to my light setting under skybox. Then I went to my skybox material and under skybox changed it to procedural.

Now from this point all you have to do is play with the settings on light exposer on how you want your scene to look. Just don't be afraid to play with the settings. This is what I came up with!

In addition to the standard procedural skybox there are 3 other sky boxes we can use.

  1. The 6 sided cube box. This option gives six sides that you can drop a pic in to create a decent surrounding.

2. The Cube map. This option allows to to drop one picture in this area and unity will transfer that imagine into a cube like environment in your scene.

3. The panoramic. We all took these kind of photos with our smart phones and it is just that, a panoramic view of our scene. Hope this helps

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