GLSL Programming/Unity/Skyboxes

This tutorial covers the rendering of environment maps as backgrounds with the help of cube maps.

It is based on. If you haven't read that tutorial, this would be a very good time to read it.

Rendering a Skybox in the Background
As explained in, a skybox can be thought of as an infinitely large, textured box that surrounds a scene. Sometimes, skyboxes (or skydomes) are implemented by sufficiently large textured models, which approximate an infinitely large box (or dome). However, introduced the concept of a cube map, which actually represents an infinitely large box; thus, we don't need the approximation of a box or a dome of limited size. Instead, we can render any screen-filling model (it doesn't matter whether it is a box, a dome, or an apple tree as long as it covers the whole background), compute the view vector from the camera to the rasterized surface point in the vertex shader (as we did in ) and then perform a lookup in the cube map with this view vector (instead of the reflected view vector in ) in the fragment shader:

For best performance we should, of course, render a model with only a few vertices and each pixel should be rasterized only once. Thus, rendering the inside of a cube that surrounds the camera (or the whole scene) is fine.

Complete Shader Code
The shader should be attached to a material, which should be attached to a cube that surrounds the camera. In the shader code, we deactivate writing to the depth buffer with  such that no objects are occluded by the skybox. (See the description of the depth test in .) Front-face culling is activated with  such that only the “inside” of the cube is rasterized. (See .) The line  instructs Unity to render this pass before other objects are rendered.

Shader Code for Unity's Skybox System
The shader above illustrates how to render a skybox by rendering a cube around the camera with a specific shader. This is a very general approach. Unity, however, has its own skybox system that doesn't require any game object: you just specify the material with the skybox shader in the main menu Edit > Render Settings > Skybox Material and Unity takes care of the rest. Unfortunately, we cannot use our shader for this system since we have to do the lookup in the cube texture at the position that is specified by the vertex texture coordinates. This is actually easier than computing the view direction. Here is the code:

As mentioned above, you should create a material with this shader and drag the material to Edit > Render Settings > Skybox Material. There is no need to attach the material to any game object.

Summary
Congratulations, you have reached the end of another tutorial! We have seen:
 * How to render skyboxes.
 * How to render skyboxes in Unity without game objects.