How to Alter Your Prebuilt Texture Maps in Unity

Objective: To explain how to change your existing texture maps in Unity.

This article is going to cover changing our existing texture maps in a Unity project so we don’t need to mess around with our UV maps. One option would be going into the ‘Base Map’ of the game object and adjusting the colour that way (which is still a viable way to go about it, if it works). But we have an issue if we want to change the texture to a nice steel blue/grey and that is we already have a existing yellow colour embedded on the column game object. When we try to change the colour this way it doesn’t allow us to make it a grey (as shown below):

Changing the Texture Maps with Photoshop or GIMP

The first step is to find the texture maps in Unity that you want to adjust and you are going to open them in a software like Photoshop or GIMP. Right click on the texture in Unity → ‘Show in Explorer’. Now open the file into Photoshop/GIMP. For the purpose of this article I will be using Photoshop.

We now want to go to our adjustment layers and choose ‘Hue/Saturation’. Let’s bring down the saturation quite a bit (approx. -75) and increase the hue to approx. 170. Then we can adjust the lightness a little bit to what we want:

Now we go the ‘Curves’ and adjust the middle of the curve to make it taller giving it more contrast:

Let’s now ‘Save As’ → PNG file into the same directory giving the file a new name extension (blue). Now this file should be saved in your Unity project (and you shouldn’t need to import) next to the one we opened.

Now drag the blue texture into the ‘Base Map’ field to replace the colour texture and we don’t have to worry about messing up our UV maps.

If it is still not quite to your liking, you can simply head back into Photoshop (working on the same file) make any necessary adjustments and save over the same file. It will now automatically be updated in Unity.

Now that we have the right colours for our texture don’t manually go and change the curves of your next type of game object as it can be very time consuming. Let’s use the same layers from the column textures. To start with let’s drag the new texture into Photoshop as a new tab (in my case it is going to be my ground/walls textures). Highlight both the layers from the column texture and right click → ‘Duplicate layer’ → ‘Document’ → ‘Grounds.png’. Now save another .png file for the ground textures and similar to the steps above head back to Unity and drag the new texture to the grounds ‘Base Map’.

What a great way to save time and make large changes to a scene without having to play around with the UV maps!