Using Decals in Unity

In today’s blog post, I’ll walk you through the process of adding decals to our video game in Unity.

What is a decal?

A decal in Unity is a 2D or 3D graphical overlay that is applied to a surface in a 3D environment. Decals are used to add details, textures, or visual effects to objects without altering the underlying geometry. They are particularly useful for adding things like dirt, scratches, bullet holes, stickers, sprays or other localized visual elements to surfaces in a video game.

How to use it?

Start by downloading a decal package from Filebase. For this, I’ve chosen the “Blood Decals 02” asset.

Once downloaded, import it into Unity.

So to test our decals, I’m gonna drag in an object and drop the “Blood_Splatter_02” decal on it.

As we can see, nothing happed there, but when I rotate it 90 degrees, you can clearly see the blood stain on the object. This is because our decal is a projection so you’d need to aim down on the surface.

One more cool thing about decals is that they can wrap around edges and even on curved surfaces like spheres.

In the next article, we’ll be talking about using Layered Lit to mix Texture Maps.