Material properties in Unity - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Material properties

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple Unity scene where you want to change the color and shininess of a material on a 3D object.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to access and modify material properties like color and shininess in Unity using C# scripts.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a material variable in a script

Set the material color to red

Set the material shininess to 0.5

Print the material color and shininess values

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Changing material properties is common in game development to create different looks and effects on 3D objects.

💼 Career

Understanding how to manipulate materials programmatically is important for Unity developers working on visual design and interactive environments.

1

Create a material variable

Create a public variable called myMaterial of type Material inside a class called MaterialChanger.

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class MaterialChanger : MonoBehaviour
{
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use public Material myMaterial; inside the class.

2

Set material color and shininess

Inside the Start() method of MaterialChanger, set myMaterial.color to Color.red and set myMaterial.SetFloat("_Glossiness", 0.5f) to change shininess.

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class MaterialChanger : MonoBehaviour
{
    public Material myMaterial;

    void Start()
    {
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use myMaterial.color = Color.red; and myMaterial.SetFloat("_Glossiness", 0.5f); inside Start().

3

Print material color and shininess

Still inside the Start() method, add two Debug.Log statements to print myMaterial.color and myMaterial.GetFloat("_Glossiness").

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class MaterialChanger : MonoBehaviour
{
    public Material myMaterial;

    void Start()
    {
        myMaterial.color = Color.red;
        myMaterial.SetFloat("_Glossiness", 0.5f);
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use Debug.Log to print the color and shininess values.

4

Run and check output

Run the Unity scene and observe the Console output showing the material color and shininess values.

Unity

using UnityEngine;

public class MaterialChanger : MonoBehaviour
{
    public Material myMaterial;

    void Start()
    {
        myMaterial.color = Color.red;
        myMaterial.SetFloat("_Glossiness", 0.5f);
        Debug.Log("Color: " + myMaterial.color);
        Debug.Log("Shininess: " + myMaterial.GetFloat("_Glossiness"));
    }
}

// Run the scene and check the Console output

Need a hint?

Open the Unity Console window to see the printed color and shininess values.