How to Add a Custom Skybox in Unity3D

• Adding a custom material to the procedural skybox
• Other custom sky-boxes

Custom Procedural Skybox Material

Create a new material and change it’s shader type to Skybox/Procedural. This will give you a material to tweak even unity’s most basic skybox extensively. It has many features to quickly change the atmosphere massively.

Quickly going from noon to sunset into a very dark night

By quickly lowering the Exposure and Atmosphere Thickness, the skybox has turned from a bright noon day to a dark blue, full moon night.

For this project I want to use a 6-sided Cube map. I love the full-moon glance right in front of the terminals, looking up directly to the sky, but for now let’s try a starry night.

I want the skybox to show off it’s starry night, but I don’t want any of the blue light mixed with the custom lightning. Also make the night very dark controlling the room tone through my lights.

Changing exposure

Here you can see some blue light that comes form the skybox on the pillars. By lowering its exposure to 0.7 I managed to have natural darkness in the building while keeping the windowed sky light on the floor.

This is a great moment to tweak the 6 Sided skybox’s rotation. The player’s point of view towards the window only fits a small amount of all the stars on this material, so let’s suit a good angle for the users looking straight 90 degrees up towards the starry, night light.

At 125 Rotation, I get a set of stars that feel appropriate with the entrance and structure of the building. Some stars line up with the columns and it’s a nice angle to look at the sky through both windows.

Angle view to both windows from the player’s perspective, standing close to the small test tubes.

Definitely a quickly way to change an entire scene’s mood.