Skyboxes in Unity

When you look out of a window and see the city in a videogame, it’s easy to assume it’s an actual city environment, and for a lot of situations like a game like GTA 5, that’s actually true. But if you’re not working on an open world game and need a huge city environment for a backdrop, do we really need all those polygons and textures that comprise an entire city just so we can have something in the background?

Thankfully the answer is no and the alternative is known as a skybox.

So what is a skybox? It’s exactly what it sounds like! It’s a six sided cube that surrounds your environment and is covered in 6 textures that wrap around the inside of the cube.

Why use millions of vertices when just 8 will do?

So how would we make one? It’s easy, actually: Begin by making a material, we’ll call it NYC_Skybox

Change the shader to Skybox, 6 sided.

Then just drag the appropriate skybox texture into their slots.

I’m currently using Unity 2020, to activate the skybox in that, go to window/rendering/lighting/and then environment, and select the NYC_Skybox there.

And there you have it! A complete environment for your scene!