Light her up — Adding emissions to your game objects using photoshop and blender

In this article, I will show you how to create an emission map and apply it to your game objects.

The first step is to find the FBX file for your object. In your scene view click on your object and under the “Prefab” section click “Select”, this will open up the file location.

From here right-click on the object and select “Show in Explorer” and copy the file path.

Next, you need to open Blender and delete the standard cube by selecting it and pressing “delete”.

To import your FBX, select “File” >” Import” > “FBX (.fbx)”. This will load the import window. In the address bar paste the link you copied earlier then click “Import FBX”.

Switch over to edit mode by selecting your object then changing the mode in the top left corner dropdown.

Now switch to “Face Select” mode and select the face(s) you want to create the emission texture on, by clicking on it. You can multi-select by holding shift.

With your object now in the scene click the “UV Editing” button at the top of the ribbon which will open the UV Editing window.

This will open the UV map of your object with the correct face(s) already selected.

Next, click the “UV” button and select “Export UV Layout”. Save this and remember the location.

Open photoshop and drag in your new texture. I have created a UV map with multiple emission points for this photoshop demonstration. Open the “Object Selection tool and place the box around the whole canvas to select all the UV sides.

Now add a new adjustment layer of “Solid Color” and make this white.

Now create a new layer and add a solid colour adjustment layer that is all black.

Now drag this layer to the bottom of the stack. Export this texture as a PNG (if you don't know who to do this check out my last article), and place it in your Unity assets.

In Unity, you want to enable emissions on your game objects material and add the texture you created into the Emission Map input. (I created a single-faced emission texture off-camera for this purpose).

Now you can adjust the colours and values to your liking.

That's all for now.