Skies

A scene’s sky is part of its environment. It is what you see behind everything, and it lights the scene’s surfaces from every direction. A new scene starts with a procedural sky, a gradient from horizon to zenith that needs no image. To use an image instead, give the scene a sky texture.

Use the starter sky

A new project includes one sky image, Sky in the Assets panel’s Environment group. It is a partly cloudy midday sky from Poly Haven (CC0), 1024 by 512 pixels.

1. Open the scene and select the scene’s own row at the top of the hierarchy, the row with the scene’s name. The inspector shows the scene’s settings.
2. Under Environment, set Sky Mode to HDREquirect.
3. Set Sky Texture to Sky.

Beside them, Sky Intensity brightens the sky and the light it gives, and Sky Rotation turns the sky about the vertical axis, in radians (0 to 6.28, a full turn).

Import your own

Two kinds of image make a sky. Import either with Import… in the Assets panel’s right-click menu, or drag the file onto the editor (see Importing your own files).

A panorama (equirectangular)

A panorama is one image that covers every direction, twice as wide as it is tall. Most sky downloads come in this form, and Poly Haven’s skies are free to use.

• An .hdr file is set up as a sky when it is imported. HDR keeps the sky’s full brightness, so it lights the scene as well as filling the background. Use Sky Mode HDREquirect.
• A PNG or JPG panorama imports as an ordinary texture. Open it from the Assets panel, choose Preset > Equirect Sky on the texture page’s bar, and save. Then use it as above.

A cubemap

A cubemap is six square images, one for each side of a cube. Put the six files in one folder, named by a common pattern, and import any one of them. The importer finds the other five by name and makes one sky texture from all six. It recognises these patterns, in upper or lower case:

+X	-X	+Y	-Y	+Z	-Z
px	nx	py	ny	pz	nz
_posx	_negx	_posy	_negy	_posz	_negz
right	left	top	bottom	front	back

The pattern ends the file name, and the part before it is shared by all six: for example sky_px.png, sky_nx.png and so on, or px.png alone. The px and right patterns may follow an underscore or not; _posx always does. All six images must be square and the same size. Use Sky Mode Cubemap.

A sky image is usually large, and it is part of what a player downloads with the game. 1024 by 512 is often enough for a background, and 2048 by 1024 gives a sharper one.