Finalizing the asset

This doc goes into how to use low resolution textures in Unity, and Advanced Approaches to Palette Texturing...

Combining Metallic and Smoothness

As Unity is the target platform using the Standard Material, the Smoothness and Metallic textures need to be combined into one texture.

Metallic is applied to the Red Channel and Smoothness is applied to the Alpha Channel.

The best image format is PNG as it supports an Alpha channel.

Using Palette textures in Unity

As most engines will tend to blur low resolution textures by default, you may need to adjust some of the material settings. Other engines such as Unreal or Godot will most likely have something similar.

Setting the Texture to Point (No Filter)...

• Select the imported texture in Unity.

• Switch the 'Filter Mode' from 'Bilinear' to 'Point (No Filter)' in the Inspector.

• Make sure to Apply the change at the bottom of the details in the Inspector.

This will make sure that the texture does not blur, and your colors should look correct when applied on the asset.

Advanced Palette Texturing Techniques

If you have the room to move on polycount in your final experience, you can actually consider adding more detail as polygons instead of texture such as ink lines or basic shading. As you are significantly reducing the drawcalls of your experience due to using a single material, you can certainly increase the polycount by a certain amount, even for low end devices like Mobile, standalone VR/XR and WebGL experiences.

Another benefit of this is that regardless of how close you get to the asset, the color edges will always be sharp, whereas if you are using average sized textures, you can sometimes get blurring or pixelation.

Moving On

As fast and efficient as Palette Texturing can be it can be very limiting to only have simple colors to use for an entire asset or experience.

In the next category, we will be taking the basics of Palette Texturing to the next level using Gradients instead and look at some approaches to utilising them in interesting ways.