Fun with Skybox’s in Unity
Objective: Setting up a skybox in unity.
A skybox can be very useful for lighting in the screen, instead of having to change everything to make it look like it’s at night, we can add in a skybox of a night sky and have it change the lighting to match. Another positive side effect of having a skybox is adding in far-away detail instead of having to remake it all.
As you can see there is a night and day difference with the skybox compared to without one.
To add in a skybox, we can add in a new material and name it skybox, since we want this to be a skybox we will want to change its shader to a skybox shader. I will be using 6 images to make up the skybox so we can select the 6 sided option.
Now we can add the 6 images to the material for the skybox.
And with that the skybox is done, all we need to do now is make use of it. To do this we go into the lighting settings. Click on windows then Rendering, then lighting.
It may be different depending on what version you are using. One I have found to work on multiple versions is to click on the bottom right of the unity window where it says auto-generate lighting On/off. Clicking on that will bring up the lighting settings.
After getting to the lighting Settings, we want to change over to the Environment tab and change the Skybox Material to the one we just made. It may be under Scene, depending on what unity version you are using.
After a few seconds (depending on your computer) it should update the lighting for the scene. Now when we look out those windows, it looks like there is a nighttime city outside.
This just another step into the world of 3D environments and lighting. There is so much to explore and experience. Maybe we can explore a little more together. See you in the next one!
