Create a Skybox in Unity with AI for Beginners

hi friends today I'm going to show you how to create a Sky Box using this cool AI tool that I found but first what is a Skybox a Skybox is a visual effect that renders a sky it's a six-sided cube with a different texture on each inside face each texture represents a view of the sky along a particular World axes so we can see in this image how each texture here is labeled with a different axes now the seams shouldn't show between the textures so that it looks continuous check for seams because you may need to fix them in Photoshop Unity places your scene inside this Cube exactly at the center and then Unity renders this first in the background here we can see a cube map as a sphere and this is what I'm going to show you how to create from a texture and here's just some several commonly used Cube map layouts that are supported why is this important the Sky Box influences your scene's lighting a lot this and the directional light which is the Sun have the biggest effect on the lighting in your scene keep this in mind when you're planning your lighting you should get these down first before adding any other lighting objects like Point lights to your scene there are many ways to create a Skybox you can find free ones on the unity asset store or a website like polyhaven just do a search in your favorite web browser for hdri and then you can find where free downloads are available let's take a look at what polyhaven has you can see here how it should generally look as a flat image let's say we want to use sunflowers so let's click on that in the upper right here I would choose 1K it does not have to be that large because remember this is for VR and then choose HDR and then download another thing I want to mention is I recently started playing with baking a Skybox into a reflection probe because the captured image is stored as a cube map which then you can easily use for your Skybox this is really cool because you can put a lot of models into a scene that you end up baking into an image to create that depth without having all that extra geometry I have not perfected this technique yet but if I find that I have a really good example to show you I definitely will in a Future video just letting you know in case you want to experiment with this idea okay enough Theory let's check out that cool AI tool that I was mentioning It Is by blockade labs and this is what you will see when you first arrive at the site and at the bottom is where the prompt is located and here you can type in what you imagine this Sky Box needs to look like so dream up your world it says I'm gonna type A Chicago Skyline oops Skyline at night with fog and mist and we're just gonna leave it at that not super creative and detailed but you get the idea then we can click on the right here for this menu and I'm going to choose sci-fi and see how this looks and press generate oh that looks kind of nice I like how this also looks low poly I think that could match my scene it might be a little bit too bright but let's just check out how this uh looks and then of course if you look up you can see there's some seams there that you would wanna you would want to fix okay so let's press download Unity I'm going to place this image right into my sky boxes folder and we do not see that sphere yet so we need to create the cube map and how to do that is go to the inspector after clicking on the image from your project window and under texture shape select Cube and then at the bottom don't worry about anything else because we can always change these settings later you're going to press apply great there's the cube that we need that looks really cool but now we need to create a Skybox material to use this with so in the same area because I want to keep everything together I'm going to right click and create material I'm going to lock this material here and I'm going to rename it so it doesn't say new material so let's rename that sci-fi Chicago there we go [Music] now under Shader in the inspector here we're going to change this to Skybox Q map and then we could either select here or we can drag right from our project area [Music] that Cube map that we just made this is ready to go but don't forget to unlock that then you're going to go to the lighting Tab and it's going to be under environment where you find the Skybox material but you might not have a lighting tab yet so how to find that is go to window and then it's under rendering and lighting and then you'll see the tab come up and then you can place it wherever you like I like to put it right here because lighting I use quite a bit so I like to see it next to the inspector right now we have Chicago Eve apply but if I click this icon here I could then search for my sci-fi Chicago and see how that looks ooh cool so if we look how this turned out in the scene it is a little bright I'm not sure I like that um it's going to make everything else whoa really dark it just that's like too high contrast for me it's not Blended as as well but it's kind of cool to see you know how this looked I really liked what I created earlier um I forget the prompt I apologize for that but I like Chicago Eve because I feel like that just Blends in with the Grays that I have going on I think I had gray in the prompt but I'm not really sure one thing you'll notice about this is yes there is I think a seam on this one as well but there's a lot of banding here and that's because this image is being compressed so if we go to the inspector and then click on this is the one that I use the texture at the bottom here you can change the Mac size but really what's affecting this is the compression so I'm gonna instead of compressing it just put none and press apply and see what happens it looks really nice so it did clean up all that banding and 512 is not a very large size and it's great because you didn't have to you know use like a really heavy image so that's going to optimize your game really well now how high can you go well let's just like click on here I wouldn't go any higher than 1024 because the maximum light Map size for that the quest can handle is 10 24. so you really don't need to and I would just check this by your eye you might even be able to go lower I'm not sure to like 256. and if you need to further compress this you could always come back and then just check oh I want to compress this again and then press apply and it'll go back and give you that compressed uh image and that is all I wanted to talk about today I just wanted to show you that the Skybox has a huge impact on your scene so that's really great because you don't have to do a lot to create something dramatic in your scene what I also like is that a lot of geometry didn't need to be used this is an image but we can see a lot of depth with um having you know this in the scene but there's not a lot of geometry added because it's an image so that's really great I also wanted to see how the blockade blockade Labs a tool would work and I'm really happy that it was really fun to use I feel like this is great for concepting and prototyping and just establishing that Vibe while you're working that's it so I hope this was a helpful and enjoyable video if you liked it please subscribe and give me a like and I'll see you next time thanks for watching

Channel: Flutter VR Design

Views: 4,239

Keywords: Blockade Labs Skybox Lab, blockade labs skybox, blockade labs ai, blockade labs, skybox unity, skybox unity tutorial, cubemap unity, skybox vr, poly haven, vr, virtual reality, virtual reality tutorial, unity virtual reality, vr designer, learn vr design, unity, unity 3d, unity vr, vr design tools, vr design tips, vr for designers, vr design, game dev, vr for beginners, game designer, indie game development, women in games, women gamers, female game developers, ai, skybox

Id: 31bJ8OVlRHc

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023