Journal 53 — Materials in Unity

Objective: To see different material options and effects in Unity.

In the example below from “The Great Fleece”, there are multiple game objects with different materials applied, and several blank ones that we can create materials to see their effects in action.

In this first example, let’s create a black marble column.

To start, we can create a new marble material from scratch.

We can drag this new material onto the blank column.

We can then adjust one of the material parameters, the albedo color. One simple approach is to check the hexadecimal value of what we are trying to match, and copy and paste that to the new game object.

Next, we can find the marble texture in the included assets.

Note the texture tiling and offset also need to be adjusted.

Finally, the shader type, metallic parameter, and smoothness parameter all need to be adjusted.

In this next example, there’s a white column with the same black marble texture. Now that the black marble material is created, it can simply be dragged and dropped to fix the missing material.

In this example, we have a wall panel with three materials: a white wall texture, black marble, and gold inlay.

Here’s the settings for the white wall material and gold inlay.

Now that we have these materials, we can apply these to the game object with missing materials.

This decorative wall panel also includes a painting surrounded by gold inlay.

We can search for the correct painting that fits the panel size by clicking on the circle by the Albedo parameter.

Now we can create a new painting material.

Then we can add the painting texture to the Albedo parameter, and set the Metallic parameter.

Finally, we can add the painting material to the wall panel.

For additional information, see these material charts for examples.

Thank you for stopping by!