Introduction to Unit 7

Get started with shaders and materials

Explore meshes and rendering

Explore shaders

Simulate solid surfaces

Map materials with textures

Create translucent and transparent effects

Add physical texture with bump mapping 

Challenge: Create your still life composition

Add materials to your game

Unit 7 - Materials

Add physical texture with bump mapping

In this unit, you’ll learn how to add custom materials, including a repeating pattern and a normal map to simulate height and surface texture. Then you’ll apply those new skills and add animations to your own game.

Welcome to the course

Install the Unity Hub and Editor

Get started with the Unity Editor

Create a balanced primitive structure

Introduction to Unit 2

Setting up the Game

Moving the Player

Moving the Camera

Setting up the Play Area

Creating Collectibles

Detecting Collisions with Collectibles

Displaying Score and Text

Adding AI Navigation

Building the Game

Fill out a Game Design Document

Introduction to Unit 3

Get started with audio

Create 3D sound effects

Add special effects to existing audio

Challenge: Your own soundscape

Add audio to your game

Introduction to Unit 4

Get started with VFX

Play around with a Particle System

Create an environmental Particle System

Create a burst particle

Challenge: Add some magic to your scene

Add VFX to your game

Introduction to Unit 5

Get started with user interfaces

Add a title to your scene

Manage screen size and anchors

Create a menu background with images

Add basic button functionality

Add toggles and sliders

Challenge: Make a worldspace UI

Add UI to your game

Introduction to Unit 6

Get started with animation

Create your first 3D animations

Refine your animation

Control animation with an Animator

Import animation

Challenge: Bring the scene to life

Add animation to your game

Introduction to Unit 8

Get started with lighting

Get started with lighting in Unity

Configure the Directional Light and skybox

Add light sources to your scene

Configure shadows in your scene

Bake a lightmap for your scene

Improve your lighting with Light Probes

Examine and complete the indoor scene

Refine and troubleshoot the indoor scene

Showcase your work with lighting

Add lighting to your game

Introduction to Unit 9

Explore the production cycle

Reimagine your game on multiple platforms

Iterate on the player controller

Source new assets

Unity pro tips

Prepare for the UCA Game Dev exam

Finalize your project

Unit 1 - Unity fundamentals

Unit 2 - Program a basic game

Unit 3 - Audio

Unit 4 - VFX

Unit 5 - UI

Unit 6 - Animation

Unit 8 - Lighting

Unit 9 - Iterate on your game

In this unit, you will create your first Unity project, get comfortable using the Unity Editor, and then design your first scene. 

Unit 1 - Get started in Unity

In this unit, you will create a simple game called Roll-a-Ball that will be the foundation for your personal game project, which you will work on for the entire course.  

In this unit, you’ll learn how to implement audio effects in Unity. Then you’ll apply those new skills and add audio to your own game. 

In this unit, you’ll learn how to implement visual effects (VFX)  in Unity. Then you’ll apply those new skills and add VFX to your own game. 

Unit 4 - Visual Effects

In this unit, you’ll learn how to create user interfaces (UI) in a Unity project. Then you’ll apply those new skills and add UI to your own game. 

Unit 5 - User Interfaces

In this unit, you’ll learn how to create and control animations in a Unity project. Then you’ll apply those new skills and add animations to your own game. 

In this unit, you’ll learn how to add lighting to your scene to make things more polished and visually pleasing. Then you’ll apply those new skills and add lighting to your own game.

In this unit, you’ll reflect on the process so far, iterate on the player controller, swap out the assets in your game, and then you’ll learn some Unity tips and tricks to take your skills to the next level.

Unit 9 - Iterate on your Game

In this unit, you’ll make sure you’re ready to take the certification exam and make any final adjustments to your game to make sure it meets the goals outlined in your Game Design Document.  

Unit 10 - Prepare for certification and publishing

This course is designed to help you prepare for the 

Unity Certified Associate: Game Developer

In this course, you will master the fundamental skills needed for game development with Unity, including programming in C#, designing immersive audio and stunning visual effects, crafting intuitive user interfaces, and applying unique animations, materials and lighting.

You'll start by creating a design document for your own game, then gradually build a working prototype. Throughout the course, you'll enhance your game using the skills you acquire, taking it from a simple idea to a finished product.

Towards the end of the course, there is dedicated time for a comprehensive review of everything you’ve learned to ensure you’re fully prepared to ace the exam

When you're done with the course, you will not only have the skills to pass the Unity Certified Associate exam and continue creating your own games, but you'll also have a fully realized game that you've designed and created from scratch.

2022.3

UCA: Game Developer - Certification Prep Course

a165e382-bb94-420a-a790-5b6174604609:cb883c6cdccb

Overview

Review your skills

About still life

Create your still life composition

Success criteria

What will you do next with shaders and materials?

Next steps

Submit your project

This composition fills with assets that was provided on this project including a ball with shimmering shader effect. It was a fun experience, especially with a new technique in Unity that I haven't learned before.

Still-Life 3D Unity Clip.mp4

Still-Life with Shimming Orb Ball

ImaginaryDataSystem

This tutorial helped guide me to make several materials.  In this submission, there is a material for my plastic water bottle and cap, a golden apple of the sun, a silver apple of the moon, my camping coffee mug, the granny apple and a shader graph material which I applied to the cube.  The smaller cube on top of the shader graph cube has one of the metallic shaders that was included in the tutorial, which I adjusted settings chaotically to obtain the odd effect.

Shader Graph Tutorial

SereneSparrow

i created still life composition by creating a base shader like lava which i placed on a quad and another quad which shows ice and all the other elements are placed on it

Still Life

saifkhattak131

project

kbssab

Still life work including some materials and a unique texture.

Still life work

wechat_os_Qy0y3_ciWjjqprqlumIcQQeu0

Petr Knedlík

A simple composition of objects created during the tutorials in this Mission.

Transparent Effects: Fibre ball and glass cube;

Still Life Composition

Cheriewx

This is my workbanch I creat oven or 3 different material and light 

Design libarey.mp4

I Design workbanch 

banten

Galaxy Animation Shop

It’s time to create your own work of art! We challenge you to create a still life composition with a variety of surfaces, demonstrating what you’ve learned about shaders and materials.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to demonstrate your new skills in shaders and materials. 

Unity Recorder User Manual

Using Shader Graph 

Designed for post-secondary and K-12 educators at accredited academic institutions teaching Unity in the classroom, the Unity Educator plan provides you with free access to the same real-time 3D development tools used by professionals to support your students.

Included in this plan are Unity Pro, cloud-based collaboration, cloud build, free Unity assets, and much more!

Creative Core Pathway Facilitator Kit.zip

Creative Core Pathway Facilitator Kit (Google Drive)

Unity Educator Hub

The Unity Creative Core Pathway Facilitator Kit includes everything you need to successfully bring this Pathway into your learning context including a syllabus, complete lesson plans, standards alignment, teacher preparation guide, and more. 

Games

Film

Automotive

Shaders and materials

Creative Core: Shaders and materials

You’ve now learned a great deal about shaders and materials. In fact, if you’ve completed all the exercises in these tutorials, you have nearly limitless possibilities for designing the surfaces of 3D objects! 

In this tutorial, you’ll apply your new skills to a challenge: create an artistic composition to demonstrate a variety of materials. If you like, you can share your composition with others in the Learn community — we hope you will

Material management: You have managed and organized your materials among your project assets. You’ve edited materials in the Material Inspector. 

Solid maps: You have used solid maps (that is, one set of values across the entire surface of a mesh) to create surfaces with uniform color, specular/metallic reflectivity, and smoothness. 

Texture maps: You have used 2D image files as both tiled and UV-mapped textures to control color, specular/metallic reflectivity, smoothness, alpha clipping, transparency, bump mapping, occlusion, microsurface details, and emission.

Shader Graph: You’ve created at least one custom shader.

A still life composition is a work of art depicting a collection of objects. Typically they are inanimate (that is, not living, or still). The objects can be found in nature, like the fruit and the plant stem on your workbench, or they can be man-made, like the kettle or the jar.

Do an internet image search on “still life” and you’ll see hundreds of interesting (and sometimes even bizarre) artistic compositions. In real life, a still life artist looks for a variety of physical attributes in their still life collection — colors, shapes, glossy and rough surfaces — and pays attention to the ways light interacts with them.

A still life composition is an ideal challenge for you as an artist in shaders and materials because it gives you an opportunity to showcase many different surfaces. In this challenge, we hope you’ll show us a number of varied materials arranged in a pleasing composition.

To complete this learning experience, your challenge is to create a still life composition that shows off materials you have created yourself. Your artistic goal is similar to that of the real-life still life artist, except you get to create surfaces, not just find them!

1.  Use the empty plinth in the center of the gallery, next to the workbench, to create your masterpiece. 

2.  Demonstrate the use of solid maps, texture maps, transparency, and bump mapping in your composition. 

3.  Use any objects you worked on in this tutorial. You can also build new objects with primitives, import objects from your own projects, or add models from the Unity Asset Store (many are free!).

4.  There are additional texture files in the Textures folder of the project. You can also find more texture files in the Unity Asset Store or even make them yourself! 

5.  You may include materials you made by following the tutorials (such as the glass jar), but also include at least five materials that you create on your own. Please don’t use materials from the Unity Asset Store unless you change them in a significant way. Find ways to demonstrate your new skills!

6.  Include one shader made in Shader Graph, even if the effect is similar to a material you could make without it (with the URP/Lit Shader).

7.  For any resources that you find online, be sure to credit the source. A text file that lists the creators, the website you got the resources from, and any other requested information is a good way to handle it!

8.  You can submit one or more images or a short video of your composition at the end of this tutorial. (The submission is optional.) If you want to take more polished images than just using screen capture on your computer, you can use the Unity Recorder Package to capture and save data when in Play Mode. This package is capable of recording videos, still images, GIFs, and more.

You should expect to spend at least two hours on this challenge.

We hope you’ll share your progress with the community here on Learn!

You’ll know you’re successful if you’ve met these criteria:

Display at least five original materials.

Position your materials in the light to show their material properties. For example, if an object is shiny, make sure we can see a specular highlight.

Apply basic principles of artistic composition to make your still life pleasing and interesting. Search the internet for “7 principles of art” to learn more.

When you’ve completed your composition, step away from it for several hours and then come back to it fresh. Do you enjoy looking at it? If so, then it’s art! 

As you have seen, shaders and materials are a crucial part of any project where visuals matter — which is most of them! If you are interested in doing more with shaders and materials, there are a few different paths you can take:

Learn to model objects and textures using a modeling tool. These include Blender®, Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya®, Adobe® Substance 3D Collection®, and Pixologic® ZBrush®. 

Learn more about creating shaders and materials in the Unity Engine. An excellent way to learn shaders is to continue learning about Shader Graph.

What professionals work with shaders and materials?

In the typical production pipeline, several professionals work with shaders and materials. Environment artists, character artists, visual effects (VFX) artists, and many others create materials using both the provided shaders and customized ones. For example, a character artist can create variations in skin color, tone, and features to create skin for an entire family of aliens. An environment artist will create materials for the sky, rocks, and plants on a distant planet.

When these various artists collaborate on a project, they must align their artistic visions. They need a foundation in the principles of color, texture, and artistic composition. Also, they should have a good working knowledge of the physics of light and how to configure lights in Unity. 

On projects with specialized team members, technical artists solve technical issues for other artists. For example, if an artist wants a certain visual effect that can only be achieved through coding and some highly advanced Unity workflows, a technical artist will provide the technological know-how. Technical artists need a deep understanding of the features and capabilities of several engines, including Unity. They must also know coding and art and design. They are also skilled users of modeling applications and can import large assets and projects into Unity. 

Shader artists are specialized technical artists who create shaders to mimic both real-world and other-worldly effects. For example, shader artists can create slimy goo, flowing lava, alien characters’ skin, and anything else a project requires. 

Congratulations! You have completed the learning required for Creative Core: Shaders and materials.

You have the core skills and knowledge for one of the primary creative domains within the Unity Engine.

Now you’re ready to apply these skills in other projects! We can’t wait to see what you make next.

When you’ve completed this challenge, please submit and share your project. This isn’t required but it’s a great opportunity to share your progress and learn from the work of others.

1.  Review the specific guidance for this challenge (above) and check your project to make sure that you have achieved the challenge criteria. Remember, there’s no deadline on submissions; you can take the time that you need to do this.

2.  Take some screenshots or a screen recording of your project.

3.  Add a submission title and description. Make sure to include the screenshots or video recording. If you have additional details to share about your process or the project that you have created, you can share them in the description too. 

6.  Check your submission preview and then complete the CAPTCHA test and select Submit and continue. 

Challenge: Create your still life composition

1. Overview

2. Review your skills

3. About still life

4. Create your still life composition

5. Success criteria

6. What will you do next with shaders and materials?

7. Next steps

8. Submit your project

Please login to submit