Texture Arrays vs Texture Atlases

Wondering how to implement a texture array in Unity? Want to know how they differ from Texture Atlases? Then this video is for you. A quick explanation of the differences with some hands on c# and shader code to get your own texture atlas up and running in Unity

[purplewine]

So excited to watch. Have always been confused about this topic.

[aliengarden]

I have never seen such a mindblowing tutorial. I am forever grateful.

[Ash_]

Its great you showed how to use texture arrays in Unity, but you didn't clearly explain why someone would even choose to use texture arrays over atlases. I've worked with texture arrays in opengl/opentk only (not Unity) the biggest benefit I found was avoiding texture bleeding issues in atlases due to floating point / pixel rounding issues, so no need for any padding etc. No need for any atlas generation step every time an image changes, the array can be loaded straight from each image. Also repeating a 'sub image' texture was much simpler using arrays. Not much difference in performance in my experience, although that depends on your gpu and size of atlas/array etc. Drawbacks of texture arrays are that every 'sub image' must be the same size and this size use power of two dimensions (last time I used them at least).

[BradenHolmes]

This is some great information. I'm working with OpenGL instead of unity but this was still quite helpful. Thank you

[codem]

Awesome, very useful to be able to use texture arrays! Thank you

[MassimoRough]

Could you point to the case advantages?

[nivalius]

Thank you very much! just exactly what i needed!

[ogmadigital]

This seems like an awesome feature to mix with a triplanar shader, or even a terrain shader! Does this tile seamlessly? When the W index is changed, does that change the material so that it counts as a second material for the purposes of draw calls, or does it count as a new material, hence requiring an additional draw call? Just bought a bunch of Penny's tutorials on Udemy and if they're of this standard, I'm even more excited to get started!

[MantoDev]

Amazing! I have a question though: what if I want to use roughness, normals, metallic, etc. Is it possible to add them in the shader script and select different indexes for diffuse and roughness as an example?
Thanks,

[НеизвестныйЯ-гь]

I am using UV2 to calculate the tile index in the shader. Thus, when scanning, I simply scatter the UV islands into the desired squares on the UV2 channel, and scale them on the V1 channel to take advantage of the tiling capabilities of each individual texture. Thus, I get 64 tile materials of 512X512 in one 4K texture. This allows me to have many models of quite high quality with one material. Unfortunately, very little is said about this technique and I "invented" it myself, which took a lot of time. In addition, I tried to create such materials in black and white and multiplied them by vertex color, which gives additional variety.

[loop]

so, if I have several cubes with different UV values, does it batch all together or each cube will generate its own drawcall?

[kadiryumlu]

Is it creating a new material instance with each object or is it still a shared material?
Because performance of texture array depends on it.

[rocksfire]

thank you for this, always so helpful.

[MonsterJuiced]

Great tutorial. I'm looking for more efficient ways of creating textures for multiple assets to use and this seems alright. I still don't know if it's more beneficial over the standard atlas though

[PRodi_]

Which one is more performant? - Texture Arrays or Texture Atlases???

[hata]

this does not work for prefab, the mesh filter store mesh instance and the mesh gone missing after Instantiate

[HammaGaming]

Why you didn't use shader graph ???

[karolledzinski]

That just doesn't make sense if we want to increase number of tiling U and V values in order to achive higher resolution seamles texture... For this purpose i would use traditional Texture Atlas.