Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Shaun Ferns
Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Shaun Ferns

Overview of this book

If you are a Unity developer looking to explore the newest features of Unity 2021 and recipes for advanced challenges, then this fourth edition of Unity Cookbook is here to help you. With this cookbook, you’ll work through a wide variety of recipes that will help you use the essential features of the Unity game engine to their fullest potential. You familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graph before exploring animation features to enhance your skills in building games. As you progress, you will gain insights into Unity's latest editor, which will help you in laying out scenes, tweaking existing apps, and building custom tools for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. The book will also guide you through many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques, teaching you how to communicate with database-driven websites and process XML and JSON data files. By the end of this Unity book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Unity game development and built your development skills. The easy-to-follow recipes will earn a permanent place on your bookshelf for reference and help you build better games that stay true to your vision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
3
Inventory and Advanced UIs
6
2D Animation and Physics
13
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More
15
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

How it works...

This recipe uses the strategy of playing a 360-degree video as the panoramic Skybox material in a scene.

We can use the Lighting Environment settings to define which Material is used for our Skybox. By creating a new material called video_m, we were able to set this as the material to be used as the Skybox when the scene runs. To be used as a Skybox material, we had to set the Shader property of video_m to Skybox | Panoramic.

To play a video, we need a GameObject in the scene with a Video Player component, and we can make this play the video at runtime in a Render Texture asset file. Render Texture needs to have the same dimensions as the resolution at which we wish to play the 360-degree video usually, we'll set this to be the same dimensions as the video, for maximum quality. So, we set the dimensions of our videoRenderTexture to 2560 x 1280.

To connect the playing video to our Skybox material, all we had to do was make the...