Using Decals in Unity

Luke Duckett
2 min readJan 16, 2022

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In this article, I will go over Decals in Unity HDRP.

A decal is a texture that can be projected over the material, think like a sticker in photoshop, graffiti on a brick wall or blood splatter on the ground.

Adding a decal to an object in Unity is pretty straightforward. Once you have created or downloaded your texture you’ll want to add create new material. To do this go to the Project tab and click the “+” button and select material, this will create a default material, rename this appropriately.

Next, you need to switch the shader to HDRP/Decal. To do this click the shader dropdown and select “HDRP” > “Decal”.

Now, we can add the base map, mask map and normal maps to the surface inputs.

The next step is to create a “Decal Projector” into our scene and assign our new texture. To do this click the “+” button in the Hierarchy tab and select “Rendering” > “Decal Projector” then drag the newly created material into the “Material” input.

Now you can move your Decal projector around your scene and project the material over your objects.

That's all for now.

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Luke Duckett

🎮 First Nations Unity Dev from Wonnarua country 🏞️ | From Player to Lifelong Learner: Crafting Games, Debugging Code, and Embracing New Technology