2D Textures

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Textures bring your Meshes, Particles, and interfaces to life! They are image or movie files that you lay over or wrap around your objects. As they are so important, they have a lot of properties.

The shaders you use for your objects put specific requirements on which textures you need, but the basic principle is that you can put any image file inside your project. If it meets the size requirements (specified below), it will get imported and optimized for game use. This extends to multi-layer Photoshop or TIFF files - they are flattened on import, so there is no size penalty for your game. Note that this flattening happens internally to Unity, and is optional, so you can continue to save and import your PSD files with layers intact. The PSD file is not flattened, in other words.

Properties

The Texture Inspector looks a bit different from most others:

The inspector is split into two sections, the Texture Importer and the texture preview.

Texture Importer

Textures all come from image files in your Project Folder. How they are imported is specified by the Texture Importer. You change these by selecting the file texture in the Project View and modifying the Texture Importer in the Inspector.

The topmost item in the inspector is the Texture Type menu that allows you to select the type of texture you want to create from the source image file.

Property:		Function:
Texture Type		Select this to set basic parameters depending on the purpose of your texture.
	Texture	This is the most common setting used for all the textures in general.
	Normal Map	Select this to turn the color channels into a format suitable for real-time normal mapping. See the Details section at the end of the page.
	Editor GUI	Use this if your texture is going to be used on any HUD/GUI Controls.
	Sprite (2D and UI)	This must be selected if your texture will be used in a 2D game as a Sprite.
	Cubemap	Cubemap, often used to create reflections. See Cubemap Textures for more info.
	Cookie	This sets up your texture with the basic parameters used for the Cookies of your lights
	Advanced	Select this when you want to have specific parameters on your texture and you want to have total control over your texture.

Texture

Property:		Function:
Alpha From Grayscale		If enabled, an alpha transparency channel will be generated by the image’s existing values of light and dark.
Wrap Mode		Selects how the Texture behaves when tiled:
	Repeat	The Texture repeats (tiles) itself
	Clamp	The Texture’s edges get stretched
Filter Mode		Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by 3D transformations:
	Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
	Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
	Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels
Aniso Level		Increases texture quality when viewing the texture at a steep angle. Good for floor and ground textures. See the Details section at the end of the page.

Normal map

Property:	Function:
Create from Greyscale	If this is enabled then Bumpiness and Filtering options will be shown.
Bumpiness	Control the amount of bumpiness.
Filtering	Determine how the bumpiness is calculated:
Smooth	This generates normal maps that are quite smooth.
Sharp	Also known as a Sobel filter. this generates normal maps that are sharper than Standard.
Wrap Mode	Selects how the Texture behaves when tiled:
Repeat	The Texture repeats (tiles) itself
Clamp	The Texture’s edges get stretched
Filter Mode	Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by 3D transformations:
Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels
Aniso Level	Increases texture quality when viewing the texture at a steep angle. Good for floor and ground textures. See the Details section at the end of the page.

Editor GUI

Property:	Function:
Filter Mode	Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by 3D transformations:
Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels

Sprite (2D and UI)

Property:	Function:
Sprite mode	Selects how the the sprite graphic will be extracted from the image.
Single	The sprite image will be used in isolation.
Multiple	Multiple related sprites (eg, animation frames or separate sprite elements that belong to a single game character) will be kept together in the same image.
Packing Tag	The name of an optional sprite atlas into which this texture should be packed.
Pixels To Units	The number of pixels of width/height in the sprite image that will correspond to one distance unit in world space.
Pivot	The point in the image where the sprite’s local coordinate system originates (center, top-left, etc).
Filter Mode	Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by transformations:
Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels

Cursor

Property:	Function:
Wrap Mode	Selects how the Texture behaves when tiled:
Repeat	The Texture repeats (tiles) itself
Clamp	The Texture’s edges get stretched
Filter Mode	Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by 3D transformations:
Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels

Cubemap

See Cubemap Textures page for more information on cubemap import settings.

Cookie

An interesting way to add a lot of visual detail to your scenes is to use Cookies - greyscale textures you use to control the precise look of in-game lighting. This is fantastic for making moving clouds and giving an impression of dense foliage. The Light page has more info on all this, but the main thing is that for textures to be usable for cookies you just need to set the Texture Type to Cookie.

Property:	Function:
Light Type	Type of light that the texture will be applied to. (This can be Spotlight, Point or Directional lights). For Directional Lights this texture will tile, so in the texture inspector, you must set the Edge Mode to Repeat; for SpotLights You should keep the edges of your cookie texture solid black in order to get the proper effect. In the Texture Inspector, set the Edge Mode to Clamp.
Mapping	(Point light only) Options for mapping the texture onto the spherical cast of the point light.
Sphere Mapped	Maps the texture to a “sphere like” cubemap.
Cylindrical	Maps the texture to a cylinder, use this when you want to use reflections on objects that are like cylinders.
Simple Sphere	Maps the texture to a simple sphere, deforming the reflection when you rotate it.
Nice Sphere	Maps the texture to a sphere, deforming it when you rotate but you still can see the texture’s wrap
6 Frames Layout	The texture contains six images arranged in one of the standard cubemap layouts, cross or sequence (+x -x +y -y +z -z) and the images can be in either horizontal or vertical orientation.
Fixup edge seams	(Point light only) Removes visual artifacts at the joined edges of the map image(s).
Alpha from Greyscale	If enabled, an alpha transparency channel will be generated by the image’s existing values of light & dark.

Lightmap

Property:	Function:
Filter Mode	Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by 3D transformations:
Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels
Aniso Level	Increases texture quality when viewing the texture at a steep angle. Good for floor and ground textures. See the Details section at the end of the page.

Advanced

Property:	Function:
Non Power of 2	If texture has non-power-of-two size, this will define a scaling behavior at import time. See the Details section at the end of the page.
None	Texture size will be kept as-is.
To nearest	Texture will be scaled to the nearest power-of-two size at import time. For instance 257x511 texture will become 256x512. Note that PVRTC formats require textures to be square (width equal to height), therefore final size will be upscaled to 512x512.
To larger	Texture will be scaled to the next larger power-of-two size at import time. For instance 257x511 texture will become 512x512.
To smaller	Texture will be scaled to the next smaller power-of-two size at import time. For instance 257x511 texture will become 256x256.
Mapping	Should a Cubemap be generated from this texture? See Cubemap Textures page for more information.
Read/Write Enabled	Select this to enable access to the texture data from scripts (GetPixels, SetPixels and other Texture2D functions). Note however that a copy of the texture data will be made, doubling the amount of memory required for texture asset. Use only if absolutely necessary. This is only valid for uncompressed and DXT compressed textures, other types of compressed textures cannot be read from. Disabled by default.
Import Type	The way the image data is interpreted.
Default	Standard texture.
Normal Map	Texture is treated as a normal map (enables other options)
Lightmap	Texture is treated as a lightmap (disables other options)
Alpha from grayscale	(Default mode only) Generates the alpha channel from the luminance information in the image
Create from grayscale	(Normal map mode only) Creates the map from the luminance information in the image
Bypass sRGB sampling	(Default mode only) Use the exact colour values from the image rather than compensating for gamma (useful when the texture is for GUI or used as a way to encode non-image data)
Generate Mip Maps	Select this to enable mip-map generation. Mip maps are smaller versions of the texture that get used when the texture is very small on screen. See the Details section at the end of the page.
In Linear Space	Generate mipmaps in linear colour space.
Border Mip Maps	Select this to avoid colors seeping out to the edge of the lower Mip levels. Used for light cookies (see below).
Mip Map Filtering	Two ways of mip map filtering are available to optimize image quality:
Box	The simplest way to fade out the mipmaps - the mip levels become smoother and smoother as they go down in size.
Kaiser	A sharpening Kaiser algorithm is run on the mip maps as they go down in size. If your textures are too blurry in the distance, try this option.
Fade Out Mipmaps	Enable this to make the mipmaps fade to gray as the mip levels progress. This is used for detail maps. The left most scroll is the first mip level to begin fading out at. The rightmost scroll defines the mip level where the texture is completely grayed out
Wrap Mode	Selects how the Texture behaves when tiled:
Repeat	The Texture repeats (tiles) itself
Clamp	The Texture’s edges get stretched
Filter Mode	Selects how the Texture is filtered when it gets stretched by 3D transformations:
Point	The Texture becomes blocky up close
Bilinear	The Texture becomes blurry up close
Trilinear	Like Bilinear, but the Texture also blurs between the different mip levels
Aniso Level	Increases texture quality when viewing the texture at a steep angle. Good for floor and ground textures. See the Details section at the end of the page.

Per-Platform Overrides

When you are building for different platforms, you have to think about the resolution of your textures for the target platform, the size and the quality. You can set default options and then override the defaults for a specific platform.

The general settings are covered below. Settings specific to a platform can be found separately in the platform’s own manual section.

Property:	Function:
Max Texture Size	The maximum imported texture size. Artists often prefer to work with huge textures - scale the texture down to a suitable size with this.
Texture Format	What internal representation is used for the texture. This is a tradeoff between size and quality. In the examples below we show the final size of a in-game texture of 256 by 256 pixels:
Compressed	Compressed RGB texture. This is the most common format for diffuse textures. 4 bits per pixel (32 KB for a 256x256 texture).
16 bit	Low-quality truecolor. Has 16 levels of red, green, blue and alpha.
Truecolor	Truecolor, this is the highest quality. At 256 KB for a 256x256 texture.
Crunched	Crunch is a lossy compression format on top of DXTR texture compression. Textures will be converted to DXT when uploading the GPU at runtime. Crunch compression helps achieving the lowest possible size footprint on disk and for downloads. Crunch textures can take very long to compress, but decompression at runtime is very fast.
Compression Quality	When using Crunch texture compression, you will see a slider to adjust the quality. A higher compression quality means larger textures and longer compression times.

If you have set the Texture Type to Advanced then the Texture Format has different values.

Property:	Function:
Texture Format	What internal representation is used for the texture. This is a tradeoff between size and quality. In the examples below we show the final size of an in-game texture of 256 by 256 pixels:
RGB Compressed DXT1	Compressed RGB texture. This is the most common format for diffuse textures. 4 bits per pixel (32 KB for a 256x256 texture).
RGBA Compressed DXT5	Compressed RGBA texture. This is the main format used for diffuse & specular control textures. 1 byte/pixel (64 KB for a 256x256 texture).
RGB 16 bit	65 thousand colors with no alpha. Compressed DXT formats use less memory and usually look better. 128 KB for a 256x256 texture.
RGB 24 bit	Truecolor but without alpha. 192 KB for a 256x256 texture.
Alpha 8 bit	High quality alpha channel but without any color. 64 KB for a 256x256 texture.
RGBA 16 bit	Low-quality truecolor. Has 16 levels of red, green, blue and alpha. Compressed DXT5 format uses less memory and usually looks better. 128 KB for a 256x256 texture.
RGBA 32 bit	Truecolor with alpha - this is the highest quality. At 256 KB for a 256x256 texture, this one is expensive. Most of the time, DXT5 offers sufficient quality at a much smaller size. The main way this is used is for normal maps, as DXT compression there often carries a visible quality loss.
RGB Crunched DXT1	DXT1 compression with crunch post-compression for small sizes on disk.
RGB Crunched DXT5	DXT5 compression with crunch post-compression for small sizes on disk.

Import Details

Supported Formats

Unity can read the following file formats: PSD, TIFF, JPG, TGA, PNG, GIF, BMP, IFF, PICT. It should be noted that Unity can import multi-layer PSD and TIFF files just fine. They are flattened automatically on import but the layers are maintained in the assets themselves, so you don’t lose any of your work when using these file types natively. This is important as it allows you to just have one copy of your textures that you can use from Photoshop, through your 3D modelling app and into Unity.

Texture Sizes

Ideally texture sizes should be powers of two on the sides. These sizes are as follows: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 etc. pixels. The textures do not have to be square, i.e. width can be different from height. Note that each platform may impose maximum texture sizes. See Android and iOS. For DirectX the maximum texture sizes for different feature levels are:

DX feature level:	Maximum texture sizes:
9.1	2048
9.2	2048
9.3	4096
10.0	8192
10.1	8192
11.0	16384

Note: The texture importer currently only allows you to choose sizes up to 8K.

It is possible to use other (non power of two - “NPOT”) texture sizes with Unity. Non power of two texture sizes generally take slightly more memory and might be slower to read by the GPU, so for performance it’s best to use power of two sizes whenever you can. If the platform or GPU does not support NPOT texture sizes, then Unity will scale and pad the texture up to next power of two size, which will use even more memory and make loading slower (in practice, this can happen on some older mobile devices). In general you’d want to use non power of two sizes only for GUI purposes.

Non power of two texture assets can be scaled up at import time using the Non Power of 2 option in the advanced texture type in the import settings.

UV Mapping

When mapping a 2D texture onto a 3D model, some sort of wrapping is done. This is called UV mapping and is done in your 3D modelling app. Inside Unity, you can scale and move the texture using Materials. Scaling normal & detail maps is especially useful.

Mip Maps

Mip Maps are a list of progressively smaller versions of an image, used to optimise performance on real-time 3D engines. Objects that are far away from the camera use the smaller texture versions. Using mip maps uses 33% more memory, but not using them can be a huge performance loss. You should always use mipmaps for in-game textures; the only exceptions are textures that will never be minified (e.g. GUI textures).

Normal Maps

Normal maps are used by normal map shaders to make low-polygon models look as if they contain more detail. Unity uses normal maps encoded as RGB images. You also have the option to generate a normal map from a grayscale height map image.

Detail Maps

If you want to make a terrain, you normally use your main texture to show where there are areas of grass, rocks sand, etc. If your terrain has a decent size, it will end up very blurry. Detail textures hide this fact by fading in small details as your main texture gets up close.

When drawing detail textures, a neutral gray is invisible, white makes the main texture twice as bright and black makes the main texture completely black.

The Secondary Maps (Detail Maps) and Detail Mask page describes this in more details.

Reflections (Cube Maps)

If you want to use texture for reflection maps (e.g. use it in Reflection Probes or a cubemapped Skybox), pick Cubemap import type. See Cubemap Textures page for more information.

Anisotropic filtering

Anisotropic filtering increases texture quality when viewed from a grazing angle, at some expense of rendering cost (the cost is entirely on the graphics card). Increasing anisotropy level is usually a good idea for ground and floor textures. In Quality Settings anisotropic filtering can be forced for all textures or disabled completely.