Creating Unity materials

There are free web sources for realistic textures you can use:

• https://cc0textures.com/
• https://freepbr.com/

How to create a new Unity material

Prerequisite

• Unity Editor
• Texture images
• Gimp or Photoshop (optional)

Steps

1. Download texture files from web sources.
2. Create a material from Unity Editor
   • If the material is transparent, set rendering mode to Transparent instead of Opaque.
3. Add textures to the material/Main Maps in Unity Editor
   • Ambient occlusion map file (e.g. AO.jpg) to Occlusion.
   • Albedo map file (e.g. col.jpg) to Albedo.
   • Normal map file (e.g. normal.jpg) to Normal Map.
   • Height map file (e.g. disp.jpg) to Height Map.
4. Setting Roughness and Metallic of material is a bit tricky.
   • Unity uses alpha channel of either Metallic map file or Albedo map file as a Smoothness. Here, we use Metallic map alpha channel as smoothness.
   • Note that Smoothness is an inverse of Roughness. You need to inverse roughness map file (e.g. rgh.jpg) by image editing tools (e.g. gimp or Photoshop etc.)
   • In the image editing tool, add inversed roughness map to metallic map file (met.jpg) as a alpha channel: see this for gimp.
   • Save new image as a png file.
   • Add image to Metallic.

More examples

See UnityMaterialExamples for more Unity material examples.