Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Procedural materials

Procedural materials, also known as substances, are a means of procedurally generating textures at runtime by combining small, high-quality texture samples with custom mathematical formulas. The goal of procedural materials is to greatly minimize the application disk footprint at the cost of additional runtime memory and CPU processing during initialization to generate the texture via mathematical operations rather than static color data.

Texture files are, sometimes, the biggest disk space consumer of a game project, and it's fairly common knowledge that download times have a tremendous negative impact on the completed download rate and getting people to try our game (even if it's free). Procedural materials offer us ...