Light Up the Night: Skyboxes (Game Dev Day 49)
Skyboxes serve as a global visual used for the background of your game. In this project, I used a skyline of New York. Assuming you have the images, Unity has the tools for you to put them together into a skybox in just a few minutes!
I created a new material and changed the shader to a Skybox, then dragged the individual photos into their positions.
Then, in the lighting settings for Unity (Window>Rendering>Lighting), in the Environment section there is a “Skybox Material” slot. Applying this new material to that slot applies the texture across the entire scene in the background!
Looking at the result in the Scene window, you can see the scenes objects and features in the forefront, with the skybox appearing in the distant background.
Using skyboxes can enhance your scene dramatically by utilizing the baked in lighting of the images used to create the skybox itself. This will also avoid featuring a glaring mismatch of your games’ content vs a grey background. Obviously you should tailor your skybox to fit the context of your game, don’t use a city skyline for your fantasy game!
