Texture Types - Depth, Shadow, and Light

Occlusion Maps

Next up are occlusion maps. These maps contain ambient shadows - the cracks and crevices that are normally too small for light to reach unless it's shone directly into them. For single models like props and characters, you can bake these using Blender, but the results depend on your model's scale and UV mapping. In Standard, the green channel is used for occlusion maps.

Height Maps

Height maps are used in Unity to provide a "parallax occlusion" effect. They shift the texture according to the height map texture and your perspective. Unity uses a fairly cheap implementation of this effect that can fall apart from the wrong angles, so be careful and don't turn it up too high.

Emission Maps

Emission maps are for areas of a model that emit light, or glow. If you were making a material for a lamp, the light would be emissive. But an emission map has to be specially made - in particular, the unlit parts must be black! Setting up emission wrong can result in your models looking really weird. Emission maps are multiplied by the emission colour of the material. Tip: For a glow-in-the-dark effect, use an emission strength of 1.0. For a bright glow, use an emission strength of 5.0 or so.

Detail Mask

Next up is the detail mask, which controls how the detail map in the next section is applied. This lets you have a detail map that affects some parts of your mesh, but not others. In Standard, the blue channel is used for the detail mask.

Detail Maps

Detail map is a texture Unity combines with the base albedo. This is handy, because you can specify a different tiling factor for it, letting you overlay a pattern over a less detailed texture to make it look more detailed. This seems like a good idea in practise, but actually using it well is pretty hard. For more detail on detail maps, check the Unity documentation.

Detail normal maps work like detail maps, but for the normals. One example is to apply a pattern over a wall to make it look rougher at a different scale from the rest of the material to give it more variance.