I love unlit materials

I really love working with Unlit materials. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like they’re anything special, but they’re actually pretty versatile and fun to play with. So, go ahead, take a seat and listen to me ramble about it.

No lighting!

Some people might see this as a downside, but I think it’s great. With Unlit materials, lighting just doesn’t matter, because as the name implies, the materials are unlit. The material doesn’t really care about its environment. If you make an object that has a black Unlit material, it will stay pitch black, no matter how bright the world around it is. Personally, I like not having to care much about lighting.

Fun perspective tricks

Since Unlit materials aren’t affected by light, they also aren’t affected by shadows. This allows for messing around with perpective. Let’s use the cube from the previous picture as an example. From one side, it might look like a flat square:

But if you rotate it, it’ll look different:

Here’s a small demo of a 3D model I made in Blender a while ago. The execution of the effect is kind of bad here, but it’s still visible. If you rotate this cube, you’ll see cutouts of a few different shapes!

Bonus

Due to there being no visual differences when layering objects with an Unlit material on top of each other, you can combine them very easily to create more complex shapes!

And, if you want to go beyond just the Unlit materials: In Resonite, you can set a filter as an object’s material, which acts similar to Unlit objects in regards to lighting, but with the bonus of applying the filter to everything that’s rendered behind the object. You can see this effect in action in a submission I made for a Resonite photo contest: https://twitter.com/RubberDuckShobe/status/1837286010842939810. :^)