Highlighting GameObject materials on mouseover

Changing the look or color of an object at runtime can be a very effective way of letting players know that they can interact with it. This is very useful in a number of game genres, such as puzzles and point-and-click adventures, and it can also be used to create 3D user interfaces.

In this recipe, we’ll swap materials when the mouse is over an object by using a second material, showing a border:

Figure 5.20: The interactive cube rollover highlight effect we’ll create in this recipe

Getting ready

For this recipe, you’ll need an image of a white square with a black border. We have provided such an image, called border.png, in the 05_05 folder.

How to do it...

To highlight a material at mouseover, follow these steps:

1. Create a new 3D project.
2. Import the border.png image into your project.
3. Create a cube in the scene (GameObject | 3D Object | Cube).
4. In the Project...