Adding Emissions to Custom Textures

Objective: Add Emission from just the tank of the Test Tube object.

We want to give the Test Tubes more features by adding emissions from inside the tube. Emissions acts like a glow from the object. Currently, if we select our object and go to it’s material and try to add Emission, we will get the whole object to try and emit it.

To fix this, we will take the texture image into photoshop and fix it. We will find the texture and show in explorer, as done in yesterdays article.

Drag it into your photo editing software.

We can noticed that in the original picture, there is some green. In the picture that went into Photoshop, it’s now transparent. This is the location we will want to have emission. In Photoshop, we will need to select that location. With it selected create a new layer and fill in the selected area with a grey color. This will be the Emission.

Next create a new layer and drop it below the layer we just created. Deselect the area and paint the empty space black.

Now we will save it, give it a name with Emission, so we know what it is for, as a .PNG file.

Now back in Unity, we can see that file in our Project window. Select the tube and drag the Emission file, we just created, and put it in the emission section.

Now our tubes are glowing white.

We can now choose the color we want the tubes to emit. Beside the Emission Map, were we dropped the file, there is a HDR for color we can select.

That is how we can add Emission through our texture files! Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day!