My journey becoming a Unity game developer: Environment & Lighting-Creating Transparency using a Material
Objective: Take the window game asset that has 4 sub meshes and apply materials to them with a glass material in particular used to show how transparency works.
We will work with the Window Wall Start, and inside this window there is a shelf and a window wall with 4 sub meshes. One of the sub meshes will be the window itself. To add the appearance of glass to it, we need to create a new material name Glass_mat. Click on the color picker inside the Shader component, and slide the Alpha slider down towards zero. Close the color picker, then go to Rendering Mode and change to Transparent. Go to Source, and select Metallic Alpha. Back in Window Wall Start, add the Glass_mat material to Element 3 under Materials inside the Mesh Renderer. We should now see clear looking windows.
The other elements zero and 1, we can add the Black Marble Column material to each for the walls surrounding the window. Element 2 will use the Metal_Gold_mat material for the window frame.
Last, click on the Shelf_8 object and add the Black Marble Column material for that as well.
With the Glass material, there are a couple of setting beside Rendering Mode to effect the appearance of the windows. The color picker is one in which you can change the tint of the windows to give them a certain effects of being cold, eerie, hot, rainy, foggy, or clear to name some environmental effects.
Other settings you can use quickly to change the appearance of the windows are Metallic and Smoothness. Metallic you can make it look like their is no glass in the window to having a thick glass appearance. Smoothness can make the glass either really reflective of light up high to no reflections on low. The key to these 2 settings is the Source setting. If you use Metallic Alpha, it seems to give the glass a more shiny and glossy look. Albedo Alpha on the other hand seems to give a more foggy or dirty look. When playing with these Alpha settings, you will see that the Metallic and Smoothness works opposite from each other according to which Alpha setting is used.
Playing with these basic settings can give you really cool effects. Just remember to keep in mind the look and feel you want to give to the user when setting up your glass materials for any windows or mirrors in your scene.
