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Introduction to materials, shaders, and textures

Change the color, texture, and overall appearance of your models.
Read time 2 minutesLast updated 5 days ago
Materials define the appearance of a GameObject's surface. You can use different shaders and properties to create and customize materials, and add textures to further control the material's look. You can change a material's settings to make an object look like metal, glass, plastic, fabric, and more.

Meshes and materials

A material is a property of the Mesh Renderer or Skinned Mesh Renderer component. Every mesh in Unity Studio, including primitive objects or meshes you import, automatically contains one of these components. The mesh can have multiple materials, but you need to import a mesh with multiple material slots or have a GameObject made of multiple meshes. Each material slot corresponds to a part of the mesh, so different parts of the mesh can have different appearances. Each material also contains a shader and its associated properties.

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials

Unity Studio supports Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials. PBR is a modern standard for making materials look realistic under different lighting conditions. With PBR materials, your objects can look good whether they’re in sunlight, shade, or under artificial lights.

Shaders

A shader is a set of instructions that tells Unity Studio how to draw a material on your object. It controls how the object reacts to light, how shiny or dull it looks, and whether it glows or stays dark. Unity Studio doesn't support custom shaders. Instead, you can choose from four built-in shaders, each with its own options. For more information, refer to Shader options.

Textures

Textures are images you apply to a material to add color, detail, and special effects. Textures can represent surface details like:
  • Color (albedo)
  • Bumps (normal maps)
  • Shininess (metallic or roughness), and more.
Textures help make materials look more realistic, and you don't need to add geometry to the model to achieve this. For example, to make a car model, you might use:
  • Main texture for the car's paint color
  • Metallic texture to define shiny metal parts like the body and wheel rims
  • Normal map texture to add small surface details like scratches
  • Emission texture to make the headlights glow
  • Specular map to define reflective surfaces like windows
For more information, refer to the texture options in the Material reference.

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