Introduction to Visual Effects and Skybox

Overview

Visual effects (VFX) help us stylize our scenes. We can use VFX to simulate real-life immersive experiences or to create an artificial game-like environment. VFX is a broad topic in Unity. We can’t cover the complete depth of visual effects because there are a lot of concepts ranging from post-processing to render pipelines. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to create an open sky environment and cover the basics of visual effects by understanding the Particle System and visual effect graphs.

Skybox

In order to make Unity scenes more realistic, we use skybox to simulate a real sky environment by giving depth and ambiance. There’s always a default skybox material when we start a new Unity scene. Now, let’s change the already present sky.

1. In the “Project” window, right-click and click “Create > Material” to get a material object.

2. Choose the created material and navigate to the “Inspector” window.

3. Now, click the “Shader” option and choose “Skybox” from the drop-down menu.

4. We can see four options for the skybox. For now, select “6 Sided” and add the six different spliced images of the sky as shown below.