Window to the World: Skybox

Objective: Create a skybox showing the NYC skyline.

Visual impact of a Skybox, one side at a time.

A skybox is literally a box with six sides which is used to define a visual horizon. As we see above, as each individual image for the six sides of the cube are added, you can see that portion of the visual horizon ,materialize. First create a material in the Unity hierarchy named NY_Skybox. Instead of the standard shader change it to a Skybox/6 Sided, below. The textures for each side will be empty, so drag the texture corresponding to each side of the cube, i.e. cubemap_cube0 to 5 from GameDevHQ into the inspector.

NY_Skybox Material

The skybox images will not render, as shown in the GIF above, until the skybox material is assigned to the lighting environment. From the Unity menu bar, open Window > Renderer > Lighting and select the environment tab. Assign the Skybox material using the just created NY_Skybox, see below.

Assign NY_Skybox to the lighting environment.

Also modify the scene tab in lighting to provide better performance, provided you have a good graphics card. Change the lighting mode to subtractive, which will provide realistic reflections. Also change the lightmapper to Progressive GPU (Preview). Make sure auto generate at the bottom is checked to allow real-time update of the scene to make editing easier.

Lighting Scene settings