Creating the Material

This doc goes over creating the Trim Sheet Material to use with your assets...

This doc is a direct copy of the Creating the Material doc in Palette Texturing as it is the same approach.

Open the Crate in Blender.
Select the Crate.
Go to the Material Properties panel at the bottom right.
Select and remove any materials you may have applied to the asset with the '-' button to the right of the materials panel.
Create a new Material slot with 'New' and double click to rename it something like 'Palette'.
Click on the yellow dot next to the 'Base Color' property and select 'Image Texture' under the 'Texture' category in the popup.
Select 'Open' and select your Diffuse texture.

This is a quick way to connect an image in a Material, but depending on how you created the other textures, you may need a little more control, and for that we need the Shading Layout.

The Shading Tab

Blender has a many default layouts that can be used for different things such as the Layout tab for modelling, UV Editing tab for Unwrapping UVs, and the Shading tab, for setting up Materials in detail, among various others.

The Shading Layout is mostly made up of the Shading Editor window which can be found on the bottom half of the viewport. To the left of that is the Image Editor. The standard 3D viewport is above that, with the File Browser to the left of that.

Adding a Texture

With the asset still selected, go to the top tabs and select the 'Shading' tab.
You can add a texture as a node into the graph at the bottom of the viewport in a number of ways :
- Drag and drop the texture into the graph from your System Explorer or the 'File Browser' window at the top left. This will add the node and link the texture.
  - You can adjust the File Browser Display mode at the top of the window.
- Right click in the graph and select 'Add > Texture > Image Texture'. Note that if any node is selected this will not appear.
- In the Graph Menus go to 'Add > Image > Image Texture'.
- If you added the node by itself, select 'Open' and select the 'Diffuse' texture you made previously.
Left click and drag from the yellow dot on the top right of the 'Image Texture' node and connect it to the target property (such as Base Color, Metallic, Roughness, or emissive) on the 'Principled BSDF' node.
You can add more Image Texture nodes, or duplicate your original with [Shift + D], and import your other textures.

Your asset should change color if your viewport is using the Material Preview or Rendered Mode at the Top Right of the viewport.

Adding Metallic / Smoothness/Roughness from a Combined Texture

You will need to break up the combined Metallic/Smoothness/Roughness image into its respective channels depending on how you created them. In this case we are using Metallic in the Red channel and Smoothness in the Alpha channel.

Add a 'Separate Color' node with 'Add > Converter > Separate Color'.
Connect the Image Texture Yellow dot to the 'Separate Color' node.
Connect the 'Red' channel to the Metallic property on the 'Principled BSDF' node.

As Blender uses Roughness, rather than Smoothness, we will need to convert the Smoothness map so we can use the same texture in both Blender and Unity. For this we can use an 'Invert Color' node.

Add an 'Invert Color' node with 'Add > Color > Invert Color'.
Connect the 'Alpha' from the original 'Image Texture' node to the 'Invert Color' node.
Connect the 'Invert Color' node to the 'Roughness' property on the 'Principled BSDF' node.

Finalising the Material

You may need to set a texture as a 'Non-Color' for it to work correctly in Blender. This is very important for Normal maps, which we will get into in later tutorials.

Select the Metallic/Roughness/Smoothness/Emissive texture node.
Switch the 'Color Space' property from 'sRGB' to 'Non-Color'.
Do this for all textures that are not the Diffuse texture.

With your material made, you will most likely see that the asset is a mess of color. We need to tell the polygons where to go on the texture and for that we need to Unwrap UVs.

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Last updated 4 months ago

The Shading Tab

Adding a Texture

With the asset still selected, go to the top tabs and select the 'Shading' tab.

You can add a texture as a node into the graph at the bottom of the viewport in a number of ways :

Drag and drop the texture into the graph from your System Explorer or the 'File Browser' window at the top left. This will add the node and link the texture.
- You can adjust the File Browser Display mode at the top of the window.
Right click in the graph and select 'Add > Texture > Image Texture'. Note that if any node is selected this will not appear.
In the Graph Menus go to 'Add > Image > Image Texture'.
If you added the node by itself, select 'Open' and select the 'Diffuse' texture you made previously.

Left click and drag from the yellow dot on the top right of the 'Image Texture' node and connect it to the target property (such as Base Color, Metallic, Roughness, or emissive) on the 'Principled BSDF' node.

You can add more Image Texture nodes, or duplicate your original with [Shift + D], and import your other textures.

Your asset should change color if your viewport is using the Material Preview or Rendered Mode at the Top Right of the viewport.

Adding Metallic / Smoothness/Roughness from a Combined Texture

Add a 'Separate Color' node with 'Add > Converter > Separate Color'.

Connect the Image Texture Yellow dot to the 'Separate Color' node.

Connect the 'Red' channel to the Metallic property on the 'Principled BSDF' node.

As Blender uses Roughness, rather than Smoothness, we will need to convert the Smoothness map so we can use the same texture in both Blender and Unity. For this we can use an 'Invert Color' node.

Add an 'Invert Color' node with 'Add > Color > Invert Color'.

Connect the 'Alpha' from the original 'Image Texture' node to the 'Invert Color' node.

Connect the 'Invert Color' node to the 'Roughness' property on the 'Principled BSDF' node.

Finalising the Material

You may need to set a texture as a 'Non-Color' for it to work correctly in Blender. This is very important for Normal maps, which we will get into in later tutorials.

Select the Metallic/Roughness/Smoothness/Emissive texture node.

Switch the 'Color Space' property from 'sRGB' to 'Non-Color'.

Do this for all textures that are not the Diffuse texture.

With your material made, you will most likely see that the asset is a mess of color. We need to tell the polygons where to go on the texture and for that we need to Unwrap UVs.