The Exciting World of 3D Environment & Lighting!
Getting Started with 3D in UNITY
Some things that you need to consider when working in 3D.
- Every Game 3D or 2D needs a Camera.
- Every Scene needs a Light. See also How to create cinema-quality lighting in Unity.
- All game objects need to have a Material.
How you set up your camera depends on your Game. The default camera has clear flags set to sky box, you may want to use clear flags solid color.
You will also want to change the Environment Lighting Settings.
All 3D objects need a Material in order to display in your game. When you add one of the default 3D objects in your Scene it uses the Default-Material. Every Material uses a Shader, depending on the Shader selected depends on how to set up your material and what Material Properties are available.
Unity has a good reference to use for setting up materials: Material Charts.
Usually a 3D Object that you get from an artist (or you create your self) will have some sort of material assigned to it. Unity usually Imports these materials when it imports the 3D object. Sometimes you may have to modify the settings on the object to get the correct look, i.e. change the shader used, set the different textures used with the material. An object can have multiple materials assigned to different parts of the mesh and even have sub-meshes with their own materials. How the materials are set up and whether the settings should be controlled by the textures associated with it is up to the artist. These materials control how the Object looks (what parts are transparent, what parts emit light, the color of it, how it should reflect light). Read more on how to use these settings at Material Properties and Content and Context. I will explore some of these things in future articles.
Of course there are many more things that can be used to make up a 3D Scene in Unity.