In the Built-in Render Pipeline, the order in which Unity renders objects is based on two things: which render queue the object is in, and how Unity sorts objects within that render queue.
Unity sorts objects into groups called render queues. Unity renders the contents of one render queue, and then renders the contents of another render queue, and so on.
Unity has the following named render queues, which it renders in the following order:
| Name | Index | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Background | 1000 | Use this queue for anything that should be drawn in the background of your SceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info See in Glossary. |
| Geometry | 2000 | Use this queue for opaque geometry. This is the default queue. |
| AlphaTest | 2450 | Use this queue for alpha tested geometry. This is after the Geometry queue because it’s more efficient to render alpha-tested objects after all solid ones are drawn. |
| Transparent | 3000 | Use this queue for anything alpha-blended; i.e. shadersA small script that contains the mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating the Color of each pixel rendered, based on the lighting input and the Material configuration. More info See in Glossary that don’t write to the depth bufferA memory store that holds the z-value depth of each pixel in an image, where the z-value is the depth for each rendered pixel from the projection plane. More info See in Glossary. Examples include glass, or particle effects. |
| Overlay | 4000 | Use this queue for effects that are rendered on top of everything else, such as lens flaresA component that simulates the effect of lights refracting inside a camera lens. Use a Lens Flare to represent very bright lights or add atmosphere to your scene. More info See in Glossary. |
Note that SkyboxA special type of Material used to represent skies. Usually six-sided. More info
See in Glossary materials are a special case. Unity draws Skybox materials after all opaque geometry (i.e., after queue index 2500), but before all transparent geometry (i.e., before queue index 2501).
By default, Unity places objects in the render queue specified in their Unity shader. You define this value using the [Queue] SubShader tag.
You can override this value on a per-material basis.
In the Unity Editor, you can do this in the material Inspector by setting the Render Queue property. In a C# script, you can do this by setting the value of Material.renderQueue using the Rendering.RenderQueue enum.
Within each render queue, Unity sorts and draws objects based on their distance from the cameraA component which creates an image of a particular viewpoint in your scene. The output is either drawn to the screen or captured as a texture. More info
See in Glossary. The sorting behavior depends on the index of the render queue:
How you change the sorting behavior within a render queue depends on the index of the render queue: