A Guild to Beautiful Games

Working with Texture Maps

If you have been using FileBase or any assets that has been imported into Unity, they usually come with a texture map. A texture map is what give the 3D models the defining color and detailed textures. While we could edit the 3D model’s color via Unity color overlap, it is always in best practice to edit the texture map itself. Having a duplicate file is always a nice backup should you need to revert back to an original state.

Opening the Texture Map:

Within the Unity Projects window, if you open up all the folders you will usually come across a file that looks like a mash up of all the colors and details all flatten up. This is the texture map file.

If you have too much folders buried within other folders and want to access the file quickly. A shortcut would be to select the 3D object in the hierarchy and scroll down to the materials section in the Inspector. Once you find the section called “Base Map” and click it, it will automatically link the location in the projects window.

Once you find your texture map file, right click and select “Show in Explorer” this will automatically take you to the actual file location stored within your hard drive.

This is where you can right click the file again and open it with the desired editing program. For this scenario, I decided to use Photoshop to edit the texture file.

Editing the Texture Map:

In Adobe Photoshop we are going to adjust several things, first within the Channels section we are going to only use the Red channel, therefore we will need to turn off every other active channel.

Then in the Layers tab we are going to add several effects as Adjustment layers, the first one is going to be Hue/Saturation where we tone down the Saturation to zero.

Then we are going to add “Curves” and adjust the bottom two arrows sliders to make the image have as much contrast as possible.

Your image is going to end up looking very grayscale and metallic, which is what we are aiming for. Now we can save the new texture file as PNG within the same directory as the original file.

When you save in the original location as the original file, then Unity should automatically pick up on any new files added.

Now if you are doing with multiple files that are going to have the same editing style, in this case the walls and floors are the same, I can just basically duplicate the Adjustment layer within photoshop to the newly opened texture file so they can quickly accept the changes.