Material Workflow

What is a Material?

Simplified a Material is a Data container which contains:

• Assigned Shader
• Shader-Property values (e.g. Color)
• References to Textures

And that's it!

Everything has a Material!

In Unity every Renderer Component must be 'feed' by a Material.

But wait, I never needed to make a Material when working with Sprites!

You are right and this is due to Unity doing some magic in the Background.

If we Inspect the Sprite Renderer component on a Sprite, you will notice that there is indeed already a “Sprites-Default” Material assigned for you! What happens in the background is that, Unity comes with a “hidden” Sprites-Default Material and whenever you move a Sprite into the Scene, Unity will automatically assign this Default Material for you.

But don't worry if you feel overwhelmed, everything will come in place and make total sense!

It's time to move on and let's begin in creating our first material.

Continue → Our first Material