How is this effect achieved (newbie question)?

I’m fairly new with Unity and game development in general so, is there somebody who can bring me some light about this effect?

I want to trigger two things when you select a unit in my game:

Thanks.

It’s not a very newbie question actually xD.

Anyway, to modify the opacity/transparency of something, if it’s a game object and not a GUI element, it probably has a renderer and a material associated with it.

What you want to do, is through a script, change the alpha channel of the material’s color, based on time. You can use the method Color.Lerp() that “gradually” changes it, given that one of its operands uses Time.deltaTime.

Look at these:

About the rippling effect, you can easily do this with a shader, though I have no experience whatsoever in that field, so I can’t help you. You could though create an alpha channel mask that moves (that means something that moves over your texture, and wherever it has 1/0 the texture is transparent, and where it has the opposite it’s solid, with the in between semi-transparent) but that’s what shaders do, and I haven’t read how to program shaders in unity yet.