Challenge: Create your still life composition

1. Overview

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

2. Review your skills

Let’s review what you’ve learned:

• 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.

3. About still life

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.

4. Create your still life 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!

Here are your instructions:

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!

5. Success criteria

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!

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

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.

7. Next steps

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.

8. Submit your project

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.

To submit your project:

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.

4. Set who can view your submission:

• Public: Anyone who views this tutorial.

• Private: Just you.

5. Select Save and preview submission.

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