Sky
A sky is a type of background that a 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 draws before it renders a frame. This type of background greatly benefits 3D games and applications because it provides a sense of depth and makes the environment seem much larger than it actually is. The sky itself can contain anything, such as clouds, mountains, buildings, and other unreachable objects, to create the illusion of distant three-dimensional surroundings. Unity can also use a sky to generate realistic ambient lighting in 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.
Sky and render pipelines
The sky solutions you can use depend on which render pipelineA series of operations that take the contents of a Scene, and displays them on a screen. Unity lets you choose from pre-built render pipelines, or write your own. More info
See in Glossary your Project uses.
| Render pipeline | Sky Solution |
|---|---|
| Universal Render Pipeline (URP) | URP uses the same sky solution as the Built-in Render Pipeline and allows you to specify the sky on a per-Scene basis and override the sky for an individual Camera. • For information on how to set the sky on a per-Scene basis, see the Lighting window documentation. • For information on how to override the sky for a specific Camera, see the Skybox component documentation. |
| High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) | HDRP includes its own sky solution that uses the Volume system. Each Volume can include an override to specify a type of sky to draw. Each Camera interpolates between the sky settings for every Volume that affects it and draws the result. For information on how to create a sky in HDRP, see the Visual Environment documentation. |
| Built-in Render Pipeline | The Built-in Render Pipeline uses a skybox Material to define a sky for Cameras to draw. You can specify the sky on a per-Scene basis and also override the sky for an individual Camera. • For information on how to set the sky on a per-Scene basis, see the Lighting window documentation. • For information on how to override the sky for a specific Camera, see the Skybox component documentation. |
Skyboxes
A skyboxA special type of Material used to represent skies. Usually six-sided. More info
See in Glossary is a cube with a different texture on each face. When you use a skybox to render a sky, Unity essentially places your Scene inside the skybox cube. Unity renders the skybox first, so the sky always renders at the back.
Note: The High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) does not support skybox Materials and instead includes multiple sky generation solutions.
Similar to other sky implementations, you can use a skybox to do the following:
- Render a skybox around your Scene.
- Configure your lighting settings to create realistic ambient lighting based on the skybox.
- Override the skybox that an individual Camera uses, using the skybox component.
Additional resources
- Add ambient light from the environment
- CubemapsA collection of six square textures that can represent the reflections in an environment or the skybox drawn behind your geometry. The six squares form the faces of an imaginary cube that surrounds an object; each face represents the view along the directions of the world axes (up, down, left, right, forward and back). More info
See in Glossary