Day 49 — Making a start with 3D environment in Unity

Hey and welcome!

With the 2D realm covered for the time being it’s time to branch out and look into the world of 3D. In this particular article I’ll show you how to set up the project that we’re going to be working with over the few weeks as well as a little bit on creating and implementing materials in your 3D space!

Let’s start things off by setting up the project, go ahead and create a new 3D project in Unity and then visit the asset store by clicking on Window > Asset Store from the top menu and slot that in somewhere. Once the window is open search the “The Great Fleece” and acquire it so that it’s linked to your account. Depending on the version of Unity you have it may open up the asset store in a web browser.

Once that’s done you’ll need to get the Package Manager into your project by going to Window > Package Manager and from the dropdown here choose the My Assets option where you can import the great fleece project now that it’s tied to your game.

With that done your project should be imported and ready to play about with!

Creating Materials

To start things up let’s open up a scene that we can test some environment editing on. In your Great Fleece folder head over to Game > _scenes > Learning > Environment_Start and you should have something like this opened:

Lined up along the side you’ll notice several pieces that are duplicated, one with all the materials on it and one with none. The goal here is to try and match the material onto our plain object. We’ll start with the column that I have selected, go ahead and create a materials folder within the Learning folder and then create a new material called Black_Marble.

Let’s start by looking at the albedo property for our material. This is what determines the base colour for the material, so in here we could click the white box and select a black colour. We do have a better option though, we have a 2D texture that we can use on our material by clicking on the small circle next to Albedo and choosing one of the black marble textures.

With that done you can play about with the metallic and smoothness slider until you get a material you’re happy with.

Once that’s created you can click on your pillar and add in your new material in the material seciton or simply drag and drop it onto the object.

With that knowledge in hand you’ll be able to update the next pillar next to these, you’ll notice that this pillar has multiple elements in the materials section in the inspector. This just shows that the object has separate sections that need a unique material added to them, in this case the pillar needs a black marble, white marble and gold material.

We’ll look a bit more into materials later but it’s worth playing about with the different options in a new material to see what you can do with it.