Attaching an Image to a 3D Cube

Questions & Answers
1

Hello!

I’d like to add a “billboard” to a wall in my game, but I don’t know how to attach a picture to a cube. How can I do that? Materials?

Thanks in advance!

3

Using a plane works (you should now use a quad instead because they’ve got less vertices) but then you have to create a material and find a proper shader, which is a bit of a pain if you’ve got multiple cubes that all need an image. Instead you can simply use a sprite (tested with Unity 2021.1)!

  • Copy the image into the “Assets” folder
  • Set its “Texture Type” to “Sprite (2D and UI)” and adjust the settings accordingly
  • Create an empty GameObject child for the cube
  • Add a “Sprite Renderer” component
  • Now you can simply set the image as its sprite and move the sprite’s GO forward a bit, so it’s actually visible (e.g. -0.51)

That’s it!

2

Either you apply a material using the billboard texture directly to the cube, or you apply it to a plane and place that on the cube’s surface. Either way, you have to UV Map it. This is done either in your 3d modelling application or via script. Look up the Unity Scripting Manual for mesh.uv for the latter.