Dev Blog: Fixing Texture Banding in Unity

Hey Devaroos, Just a quick post from me today, but I had fun optimizing our current project, mainly looking at textures and materials. Whilst plumming the depths of the Unity project and fiddling with the import settings of our assets I discovered a surprising and quite frankly beautiful act of compression.

The default "automatic compression" in Unity doesn't like colour gradients. If one was to change the compression from automatic to DXT5 compression we not only have no more banding, which is awesome, but it also halves the size of the texture.

Our programmer loved this, and the game looks better!

So if you are having trouble with a texture banding or having its colours blend horrifically, try changing the Texture Type setting to advanced, and the compression to DXT5. I encourage you to try out all the compression that Unity offers, as some can reduce the size immensely while maintaining or even improving perceived quality.

Thanks for your time, I hope this helps out.

Tim.