Material Basics

Overview

This section will cover the basics of materials to get you started. Please check out Unity's documentation for more information.

Materials are assets that are applied to visible game objects that determine the object's texture, color, and other attributes programmed within its shader. Shaders will not be covered in this guide, but they can be coded using HLSL and tools like Shader Graph, available in some Unity project types.

Default Material

When you create a primitive object (sphere, cube, etc.), it will have a default material.

How the Material component appears in the Inspector when the object is selected.

If you click the triangle on the left to twirl down the properties, you'll notice they're grayed out.

Depending on your lighting, this default material will appear similar to this:

In the next section, we'll look at using the Unity editor to create and add materials to game objects.

pageCreating and Applying Materials