Setting the scene with a skybox
Our game environment should be dark, creepy, and suspenseful. But, every new Unity scene is created with a default, procedural skybox representing a cheery daytime, exterior. This needs to be changed. A skybox is ultimately a cube with flipped normals that surround and encompass the environment. Its faces contain an environment texture which, when mapped correctly, appears seamlessly across the model, creating the look of a vast skyline surrounding the scene. The primary purpose of our skybox should be to set a base and ambient lighting. The most appropriate skybox for our usage, then, is a night skybox or, at least, a dark, stormy (and perhaps slightly alien) skybox. There are many ways in Unity to create a skybox. One method is to create a cube-map texture (six separate textures) inside the image-editing software that maps to the faces of a cube. Another method, available in Unity 5, is a procedural skybox. Using this, Unity generates a skybox from some...