Why is the camera view pink in Unity 5?

Question

I am a beginner. I created a 3D project with a cube object, and I am getting this pink display, in the camera view.

Why is the camera view pink?

Answer 1

You seem to have created a cube as a child of the camera, thus taking up the entire view port. Imagine placing a thumb in front of a camera's lens. Since the cube's material is pink (you seem to have deleted the default material), all you see is one side of a giant pink cube.

You can either:

• Change the hierarchy of the cube. Click on the cube, hold the click, and drag it outside of Main Camera.
• Set the Camera's "Near Clipping Pane" property to a different value, superior to 1 (which seems to be the depth of the cube).

Answer 2

What you see is a default material. It is nothing to be overly concerned about; it serves as a placeholder. The only problem appears to be the colour; In my experience, the default material is usually a light grey. In the recent version of Unity I downloaded, version 5.5.0f3, it is black.

If you wish to try resetting your default material colour, I found other users who have experienced similar issues, on installing Unity. One user has found a solution, which seems to work, most of the time:

Answer by Javier_8 · Jun 23, 2015 at 10:59 PM
I fixed it.
Edit->Preferences->GI Cache->[Clear Cache]
_{- "Unity 5 default shaders are pink" @ Unity Answers}

Remember that this is the default material. Pink or not, you should still aim to replace this material at your earliest convenience, if only to a more suitable prototype material. My recommendation would be to simply ignore the pink; pink is far more noticeable than grey, making it much easier to tell if a particular mesh needs an actual material. You can find information on creating and making materials at the Unity manual.

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As for what is being displayed, I can only speculate, given the information that has been provided.

First and foremost, it is not the cube. We know this for two reasons:

1. In the inspector, your cube has its MeshRenderer disabled. This is the part that renders the mesh of the cube. While disabled, your cube is not rendering, and you will not be able to see it from the game view.

2. From the inside of a cube, all normals (values that tell us the facing direction of each face) face away from the camera. When a normal faces away from you, the face does not render, even when the MeshRenderer is enabled, as you can see in the following animation.

Given that the only other object in the scene is a directional light, I would speculate that it is the Clear Flags setting, on your camera. You might have this set to Skybox, with the default shader interfering with the default skybox. It is entirely possible that you might simply have it set to Clear Colour, and actually have the colour manually set to pink.