How to make TRANSPARENT MATERIAL in Unity

Introduction

Creating realistic transparent materials in Unity is essential for glass windows, bottles, and other see-through objects. In this tutorial, you’ll learn two techniques:

Building a basic transparent shader that reveals objects behind surfaces
Using alpha textures for complex transparency patterns (like frosted glass or decals)

We’ve included visual examples and optimization tips to help your transparent materials look great while maintaining performance.

For a visual breakdown of this subject, you may find my video discussion helpful.

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Unity package with textures

Below you can download a Unity package with all the Assets I use in an old video about this topic.

Elements to be used

To show how to make transparent objects in Unity, I will use a cube and a sphere that will have a material applied to each one. In figure 1 we see the objects in the hierarchy and in figure 2 the materials that I have created for both objects.

hierarchy in unity, two objects, one will become transparent — *Fig. 1: The objects we are going to use as an example*

red and blue materials in unity, the blue material we will make transparent — *Fig. 2: The materials that are applied to the objects in the figure above.*

I will place the sphere in front of the cube, this will allow to know if the material of the sphere is transparent.

a blue sphere in front of a red cube in unity, make transparent objects — *Fig. 3: I place the sphere in front of the cube to show the transparency.*

Steps to create a transparent material in Unity

1. We select the material we want to make transparent to visualize its parameters in the inspector. The material I am using is the Standard Shader that can be created in Unity, in figure 4 we see its parameters in the inspector.

inspector of a standard blue material in unity — *Fig. 4: The inspector of the blue material in the figure above, a standard material.*

2. We changed the rendering mode from opaque to transparent, as shown in figure 5.

shader to transparent mode in unity — *Fig. 5: We change the rendering mode to transparent.*

3. We modify the Albedo color of the material according to the color we want and decrease the alpha component until we achieve the desired level of transparency (figure 7).

color parameter of a material in unity — *Fig. 6: We change the color of the material.*

selection of the color of a material in unity — *Fig. 7: We decrease the alpha of the color to achieve transparency.*

Results

In figure 8 we see the result, the material of the blue object is transparent and allows to see what is behind.

blue transparent sphere in front of a red cube in unity — *Fig. 8: The material now allows you to visualize what is behind it.*

If you want to achieve a material similar to glass you can adjust the parameter “Smoothness”, this will make the material smoother and more similar to glass.