the visual appearance of game objects.

Applied to a renderer component,

the material is essentially an asset

that brings together a shader, a script

that controls the appearance of a rendered surface

and it's required properties, such as

colours and textures.

Materials can be made by using the

Create button on the project panel.

And once you've created this asset

it can be assigned to a renderer component

and a shader can be chosen from the drop down list.

Materials can also be generated from

models brought in from 3D packages

but we will discuss this later.

As a basic example

if we have a primitive cube in Unity

and an example material ready to use on it

we can assign this to the mesh renderer.

The mesh renderer is the component used

to render any 3D mesh.

We'll assign this to the materials slot.

By default a primitive mesh has

Unity's default-diffuse material assigned to it.

We will replace this with our example material.

Whilst I have assigned this material

by dragging it directly to the material's property

I could also assign it by dragging it to the model

or dropping it in to the scene.

And you can see that Unity previews what that

material would look like on the mesh

that we're dropping on to.

Once assigned we see settings for this material

below other components in the inspector.

It's important to know that this part of the inspector's

settings are simply a shortcut to editing

the material asset.

This is important because when changing the

properties of a material on the object

you are actually changing the material asset itself.

For example if I make this material red.

The asset has been made red.

So for example

if I have a sphere

and assign the same material

it too will be red.

And when adjusting that material on

either of those two objects

we're simply adjusting the asset so any object

using that material will be changed too.

When introducing 3D assets from

a modelling application Unity will create

the materials in a materials subfolder

in the location of the asset

as well as assigning textures for you.

For example this blast door asset has been

brought in to Unity and we have saved

it's textures in to folder called Textures

which Unity automatically searches

in order to reassign it to the material

that it creates.

The two parts of the asset are the door

and the frame.

Both of these assets share the same material

and simply use different parts of the texture

to render them.

The material that's being created is

Prop_Blastdoor

and I can see that if I click on it

it's highlighted in the project panel.

As standard when introducing this

we would be shown a diffuse shader.

This is a flat standard look for

rendering 3D meshes.

We have a normal map for this asset

so we can instead choose a bumped shader

such as Bump Diffuse

to make use of this texture.

The normal map is a way of storing

height and directional information

that is projected onto the surface

of a flat mesh

in order to give it the appearance of

surface detail without adding

vertices to the geometry itself.

And if you look at the mesh in the scene or

game view you can see the difference

that this makes.

So the dents, grooves and scratches

on our blast door are accentuated

in the normal map texture.

We could also extend this to give

it a shiny surface by choosing

Bumped Specular.

Here, in addition to the texture and the normal map

we are also able to set the shininess.

So we've gone from our default flat look

to our nice shiny looking dented door

simply by adjusting the shader.

We haven't had to add any more detail to the

original model, and that's the true power

of using materials.

Unity ships with many shaders that will

cover all manner of game development needs

and you can also write your own shaders

and assign them.

You can create these also from using the

create button on the project panel.