Bringing the scene to life — using materials and textures in Unity3D

In this article I will discuss how to create materials and mix them with textures create great 3D environments.

Take a look at our column. At the moment it is bland and boring. It has 2 sub meshes and a child with its own mesh render. We are going to create new materials to turn this into a beautiful looking marble column.

First we can create a new material. I’ll call mine White_Marble_mat. I have downloaded a marble texture which we can assign to the albedo channel.

Notice that without some changes the material looks a bit flat. I’m going to change the metallic and smoothness setting a little bit to make the material pop.

Now the texture looks a lot better. I’ll create a black marble texture as well. Now I will add both to the column.

The column is really starting to look the part now. Next I will create a simple material for the middle piece in the column. This one will not have a texture applied but I will work with the albedo, metallic and smoothness values to create a nice shiny gold colour which we can add to out column.

And there we go with a little bit of work we created a really nice looking marble column.

Thats all for now.