I’ve been trying to make a realistic gold material for coins in my game but have failed to do so in unity.
Any help would be appreciated at this point.
What have you tried? Do you have reference images of the sort of gold you want?
I had a go for you using info from here.
Basically, you use a Reflective/Specular shader, with Diffuse colour (70,40,0), Specular (255,240,215) and Reflection (255,200,100), and then you add a cubemap (I used “Mountain Path” from here, with default scaling).
Here it is on a sphere:

and here on a Roman coin (from here, decimated):

Thanks,
really nice links.
How did you get your coin to distort the image from the cubemap so much?
When i apply it in my scene, i feel like im creating a gold mirror that reflects something that is not even part of my scene.
The player has a light and can only see for a specific distance, the scene is totally dark.
It distorts the cubemap that much, as the surface of the coin is modelled that way (it’s not a simple disk). What are you using for a cubemap? If you are using pro, you could probably create a cubemap for the surrounding area using Camera.RenderToCubemap, as long as you keep the resolution quite low.
No, im not using pro, could i still do that for the “Camera.RenderToCubemap” without pro?
Edit: yeah, i just checked, i can’t do that without pro.
How big on screen are these coins going to be? Cause unless they’re seen pretty large and supposed to be highly detailed, and have an environment they’re pretending to reflect, then cubemaps and fancy shaders are overkill, simple texture (hundreds of gold coins on Google and unless they’re immortal Romans or something, they can’t exactly sue you for using them) and at most a normal map would suffice.
What Frank Oz said is quite true. Using any specular shader with the right colours in will give you a good enough gold effect, and will react to the lighting with much less fuss.
Because it’s going to bug me if I don’t say anything, lol… I just wanna add that I wasn’t knocking your suggestions or the gold color you got. I just had visions of him using high res textures and cubemaps for piles of individual coins no bigger than a few pixels in size and it made me shudder hehehe.
Hahaha - don’t worry about it. I know what you mean - “Why is the game turning into a slideshow? Must be a pile of gold nearby!”
Edit: Just in case you’re worried, OP, I just tested with 20 of those high-poly coins, and got the same 830fps that I got with one
(Unity’s usually good at that kind of thing, but don’t always assume that’s true + the texture budget)
Ooooh damn your right! Hmm thinking about it, I shoulda kept quiet, it could have been a really useful ingame “feature” hehe.
The coin will be pretty big on screen, specially when played in full screen, but Frank Oz gave me a good idea.
i added a normal map to the material and it’s pretty much the effect im looking for.
Here is a screenshot with a test normal map (didn’t take the time to properly UV map it since its a test)
Thanks guys!
Try get the color closer to gaustwick’s original example.
Also, you could consider dirtying it up too, in the creases and grooves where it’s been handled, dropped, dented and otherwise well used and has gradually picked up a lot of muck, like most coins looks at the few in his pocket ok all coins… hehe. Have the specularity amount low to nothing for the dirty bits. Along with making it look a bit more realistic, it’ll bring out the details of the coin too.
I tested with 50 coins, the amount i’m going to put, and works fine ![]()
Hi gaustwick, excellent job!
What do you suggest to get a soccer gold ball like this image examples? Normal maps? Bump map? Reflection Cube Map? I tried but did not get the results I’m looking for.

Normal map and low res blurred reflection map.
For a really quick material.
- Assets/Create/Material
- Select your Material and leave the Shader as Standard
- Change Albedo to R 255 G 226 B109 A255 or Hex Color FFE26DFF
- Move the Metallic slider to 1
- Select Source Albedo Alpha
- Add a Reflection Probe to scene Gameobject/Light/Reflection Probe
- Add a Sphere 3D object to your scene Gameobject/3D Object/Sphere
- Change your rendering Color Space to Linear Edit/Project Settings/Player
Then drag and drop your material on your 3D object.
I know that this post is really old. But what does he mean with Reflection, where do I have to assign these values? I hope someone will reply to my question.
Thank you

