Unity Dev Tooling - Overview

Unity Editor package

This is the in-Unity tooling - one of two distinct kinds of tooling in these docs. It works inside the Unity Editor. The other, the Game Tooling, is a separate app that runs on its own outside Unity.

Art Pipeline Tooling turns your Substance Painter textures into ready-to-use Materials with a single right-click. It recognises which texture files belong together, creates the Material with the right shader for your project, fills in all the texture slots, and even puts the Material onto the matching model.

It comes with three tools that work together.

The three tools

Auto Material Creator

Right-click your textures and get a finished Material, slots filled and put on the model. Open

Naming Linter

Points out texture files whose names don’t follow your naming rules. Open

VFX Pack Creator

Makes recolored, themed copies of your VFX in one step. Open

Before you start

Unity version	2022.3 LTS or newer
Render pipeline	URP, HDRP, or Built-in - it detects yours automatically
Setup needed	None - it works out of the box with Substance Painter’s default presets

Add it to your project

The simplest way, all from inside Unity:

1. Download (or get from your team) the tool’s folder onto your computer.
2. In Unity, open Window -> Package Manager.
3. Click the + button in the top-left, then Add package from disk….
4. Open the tool’s folder and pick the file named package.json.

Once it’s added, you’ll see new menu items: Tools -> Art Pipeline and, when you right-click textures, Art Pipeline -> Create Material from Textures….

Note

If your team keeps tools in a shared Git repository, you can instead use Add package from git URL… in the same + menu. Ask your technical artist or programmer for the link.

Quick start (one right-click)

This is the main way you’ll use the tool.

1. Export your textures from Substance Painter using its default Unity URP or Unity HDRP preset. You’ll get a set of files like sword_BaseMap.png, sword_MetallicSmoothness.png, sword_Normal.png, and so on.
2. Drag them into your project, anywhere under Assets.
3. In the Project window, select all those textures (or the folder they’re in).
4. Right-click -> Art Pipeline -> Create Material from Textures…, leave Type = Flat, and click Create.

The tool sees that the files all belong to the same asset (sword), creates a sword Material next to them with every texture slot filled in, and - if there’s a sword model in your project - puts the new Material onto it.

What “texture set” means

A texture set is all the texture files for one thing - one sword, one barrel, one wall - that share the same name at the start of the filename. With Substance Painter’s default naming, sword_BaseMap.png and sword_Normal.png belong to the same set (sword), because they both start with sword.

Good to know

The tool decides which Material slot each texture goes into based on the end of the filename (BaseMap, Normal, Roughness, and so on). If your studio names files differently, you can teach it your naming on the Conventions & Patterns page. The full list of texture types it understands is on the Semantic Texture Types page.

Hit something annoying? Tell us.

If anything about the Unity art-pipeline tooling feels repetitive, fiddly, or just slows you down, that is exactly the kind of thing we can build a tool for. No idea is too small - a lot of what exists here started as someone saying "I wish this just did itself."

Share an idea or annoyance →