About Skyboxes / Scene lighting

Hi everyone,

im fairly new to unity and still finding my way as evidenced by my many dumb queries on here, so forgive me if this is a stupid question -

I’ve got the “tropical” skybox, and effectively it lights my scene, right? but I’d like the same thing but… with less light, theres not like … a sun brightness or whatever in the render settings so i’m a little stumped as to how i can have a similar effects… but with more of a “late afternoon” feel to it!!

Sorry i’m probably missing some elementary facts about 3D, but hey, we all gotta learn sometime!

Cheers

Will

ps. I know you can make skyboxes, has anyone ever written a tutorial on such things?

Hi Will!

Just some general words…

The skybox does not light your scene like a HDR-Image in a Global Illumination Rendering Process. It is actually a background to display a mood and some details “outside” your gaming area. To light your 3D Objects and your scene you need to place light-sources and adjust them in color and intensity, so they fit those of your skybox.
Lighting is a process wich does require lots and lots of fine tuning, but generally the process is, that you just throw in some lights into your scene. And its very easy to do in unity… You have to be aware of what light sources you want to use. Search the manual for the types of light sources available.

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I hope, i got your question right here… if you like to change the image of the skybox itself, to make your scene catch another mood, go for some digital photos or draw some images… There are lots of good sky-box tutorials accessable through google…

That clears up a few basic confusions, thank you, I’d read the tutorial on how to introduce them in unity, but hadnt considered skyboxes as being a universal 3D “thing”, what a fool! thanks man

The sky box doesn’t provide lighting - it is only a background “image”. To set up the ingame lighting, you add lights to your scene.

If you look at the skybox material, it has a “tint” color - you can use these to add a slight tint to the skybox background. If this is not powerful enough, you most likely need to make some different images.

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One more thing about lighting: When I was making my sun light object, I started out with two more lights to act as fills. Then I discovered the Ambient Lighting setting (Edit->Render Settings). This lets you open up the shadows in your scene without having to add extra fill lights.

This is described in the Component Reference, but not in the general setup of a level (http://unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/RenderSettings.html)

hy,

i have the skybox just in white. so i choosed, render Fx->skybox cubed as as shader and white as tint color.

now i wanted to do an gui element to select different background colors.
usually i could change a material color with:

var other: GameObject;
function OnMouseDown(){
	other.renderer.material.color = Color.grey;
}

but for the skybox material it doesnt works, because there is no main color.

anyone has an idea how it could work?

thank you greetings
nicolas

Well I have quite the opposite question.
it seems to be that you have a diffuse light when you using a skybox. It is weak … but there. And I don’t want to have light in my scene that I can’t controll. Is there any possibility - “to switch the light of”? I reduce the color of the Skymap to black. And still I can see my terrain without any light objects in my scene…

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