How to Alter Pre-Built Texture Maps!
Objective: Customize your assets!
If you have been following along with me while creating this sci-fi environment, you may be put off with the default yellow that comes with the assets I’ve used. Not to worry, I’m going to show you how we can adjust these assets to be whatever color we like using Gimp.
We are going to go from this
To this
There are two easy ways to do this, and one requires having photoshop. The other is a free to use photo editor application called Gimp. If you are like me and a fan of all things free you can get a copy of Gimp here.
I’m going to start with the columns we made. Select the column and in the inspector open the mesh renderer and to find the texture map select the base map and it will select it in the project view.
Now that we have located the texture map, right click it and select ‘Show in Explorer’
With the texture map PNG selected, drag that into Gimp.
Select the Color tab and select Hue-Saturation
This opens the Hue-Saturation window and form here we can easily change the hue, saturation, and lightness of the texture map.
When you find the values that you like you can save these levels as a preset. This way, if you wanted other texture maps to match the same values you can choose the preset to easily apply it.
Select OK and we need to save our changes. Select save as, I like to keep the name the same except I will add the new color at the end of the name.
It is important to remember we need this to be a PNG. In order to do that we need to export this as well. Select Export, you don’t need to worry about changing the name just make sure the file type is PNG.
Going back to Unity it will automatically add the new texture since we exported to the original file location. To apply the next texture map, select the new texture map and drag it on top of the old texture map for that object.
You’ll notice that this changes the texture map on all of the columns. If you don’t like the color, simply go back to gimp and change the color again and export it again.
Now we can repeat this process for the floor assets, the Door, the Consoles. Whatever asset you have that you don’t like the color of you can now modify the texture map to fit your environmental needs.
Also, if the asset is too shiny you can simply decrease the assets’ smoothness.
There you have it, now you know how to manipulate your texture maps. Using this you can make the environment how you want and don’t be afraid to experiment with Gimp. I’ll see you in the next tutorial!