How to Alter Your Pre-Built Texture Maps
Sometimes you find the perfect asset for your game only to realize that the color or texture just doesn’t fit the theme/mood. Luckily, you don’t have to abandon all hope and jump ship! This article will walk you through an easy way to alter your pre-built textures.
Objective: How to alter the color of your pre-Build Texture Maps
Note: Although this is aimed at altering the color, you can follow this workflow to make more complex alterations in your photo editing software of choice.
Requirements
To alter the textures, you will need an image editing software that allows you to manipulate the hue, saturation, and brightness of your image, as well as the Tone Curve.
Personally, I will be using Clip Studio Paint, which is my go-to for any digital art needs. However, free software such as Gimp is also capable of manipulating the aforementioned values.
Finding and Altering the right Texture
A simple way to get the texture maps you need is to find them within the object’s material.
- Select the Object →Go to Material in the Inspector →Right Click → Open in Explore. The image is opened in the explorer so that when we alter it, it will be saved to the same folder and automatically update in the Project Folders within Unity.
2. Drag and drop the image into your editing software
3. Start manipulating the values. I’m going for a sort of dark metallic color so I set the Hue to be completely blue, and lowered the Saturation as much as possible. Right now this looks like a regular monochrome, but when I import this back into Unity and continue postprocessing, this will look pretty neat.
If you’re looking to add more detail to your texture, you can actually draw over it, add brushes with details to it, or pretty much any sort of editing. Anything you do to alter it can be saved to Unity, and you can do this safely by saving a variation of it and keeping an unaltered version(I will go over that shortly).
4. You can also manipulate the Tone Curve. The Tone Curve essentially manipulates the overall brightness and contrast. This can make the details and accents of your texture more apparent. Here I am using the toll ever so slightly to make the dark accents of the texture pop up more.
5. Once you are done editing your texture, it’s time to save it. By default, your save menu should direct you to the same project folder you previously opened in Explore.
- Make sure you rename the file so that you can keep an unaltered version of your texture if necessary.
- Make sure your file type is set to PNG then save it.
6. Back in Unity, you should have your newly added texture in the respective folder and all you need to do is drag and drop it over the old one and it should swap.
Adding the Same Changes for Multiple Textures
In Clip Art Paint Studio
Clip Art Studio Paint differs a bit from how you add the same changes in other image editing software.
- Create a new Correction Layer. What this does is that any Layer below it will inherit the Tone Corrections done to this one.
Here, I selected Hue/Saturation/Illumination because those are the main values to be manipulated, but you can also manipulate the Tonal Curve even if you selected this.
In Photoshop
In software such as Photoshop, you have adjustment layers that can be duplicated and added to the respective documents/texture to inherit the properties.
Although I don’t personally use this software, here is a demonstration by Al Heck:
Now you should be all set to alter and swap your textures as you see fit!
Thanks for the read! Follow me for more Unity Development Articles!
