Editing Unity grass textures in Photoshop

Objective: Edit the texture for the grass in Unity’s terrain system so that they match the low resolution look of the game.

In my most recent game release The Departure I have to make changes to the textures of many of the free assets that I used. The most useful thing that I did was to pixelate the grass to get that low resolution look I wanted.

First I painted the grass onto the terrain. I then went about editing the texture. But where is the texture found you ask? Well, I’m going to show you.

First click on the terrain object and select the grass you have been using and click edit.

Doing this will bring up a pop up window that allows you to change the grass texture among other things. By clicking on the detail texture in the window, in the project window it will take you to the texture.

Now that you have that texture you will need to right-click and click show in explorer.

This will show you the texture file that can be edited. If you have Photoshop, you will be able to double-click the texture and it will open inside of Photoshop.

Once inside photoshop, click on the channels tab, which should be next to Layers. Then deselect the colours and enabled the alpha channel.

In the main Photoshop window, press ctrl + a or make a selection for the whole the image. Then you will want to click on filter -> Pixelate -> Mosaic

Then in the new window that appears you will need to pick the cell size for the image. Doing so will then pixelate the image for you. Click OK once you have found your size.

Before saving and closing Photoshop you will want to go back to the channels tab and reverse what you did at the start. Turn off the alpha channel, and turn the others back on.

There is just one more thing to do before you will see the changes inside of your scene in Unity.

Go back to the terrain settings for the grass and click on refresh.

And now your grass should now be updated with the pixelated look.

And that is it for making changes to free assets and in particular the grass that comes with the standard assets in Unity.

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