Skyboxes In Unity

Goal: Overview the types of skyboxes in Unity

Let’s make our scene more atmospheric by exploring the types of skyboxes we can use.

To do so, let’s open up our lighting tab:

Then let’s create new lighting settings:

So you want to use your graphics card to render the lighting, and make sure auto generate is on:

Then when we go to the environment tab, here is where we can assign which skybox we want, what light we’re using, and the intensity.

To create a skybox, we make a new material:

And when choosing the type of shader it is, we select skybox:

Then for this one, we’ll be reviewing procedural:

A procedural skybox is one that you can customize. You can scale how big the sun is, its convergence, atmosphere thickness, sky tint, ground color, and exposure. I want to have my scene look polluted and dystopian, so my skybox colors are grim and green.

My room then has this green-ish and yellow tone to it:

To make this effect possible too, is to change our directional lighting settings.

I made the directional light face downwards, so all shadows are directly under their objects.

I also decided that I want the room to be even dimmer, so I turned down the intensity of the light:

Then let’s review the other possible skyboxes:

Here we have a 6 sided skybox, which you can create a cubemap by assigning 2d images to create a 3d environment:

Which our scene is now in a real atmosphere:

There’s also the actual cubemap, in which you create one beforehand and assign all the sides at once:

Make sure that when doing so, you turn the texture into a cube:

Otherwise, it comes in as this:

So our scene looks like this (of course, don’t have lettering on the texture…)

Lastly, we have the panoramic skybox, in which you can assign a panoramic photo:

And that’s all the skyboxes! I personally like making my own procedural one, but yet again, that has its limits.

Other than that, thanks for reading, and have a great game-dev day!