Texture Channel Manager

I'll be submitting my latest asset to the store later this evening and wanted to give everyone a quick peek at it. I find it a bit annoying to have to deal with putting gloss and other maps into the alpha channel. Especially when all of the maps are made up of multiple layers. Of course, the engine needs to do that to save on memory, but it'd be much nicer to be able to just export the map and have it work, wouldn't it? Well, Texture Channel Manager allows for just that.

Simply export each individual map to your Unity project and add them to Texture Channel Manager and hit save. It will automatically keep the final output in sync with whatever changes you make to the source files. As the screenshots below show, it supports RGB+A as well as all four individual channels. It also has basic image controls that are really useful for quickly adjusting the intensity of a given map.





I've also recorded a quick 'getting started' and overview style video, which you can see below. Although when I named it 'Texture Channel Manager', I didn't realize that I apparently can't say 'Texture Channel Manager.' At least not when the Record light is on. I always seemed to do fine until it actually came time to do a take. Ain't that the way it goes?

Hopefully it'll be on the Asset Store soon if there are no problems, and I'll update the thread when it is with a link.

 

Very useful!! It's irritating to have to keep adding alphas in PS / Gimp

 

Yeah, it's the kind of thing I know I'll use regularly. Which are always the best products to make because even if they don't sell well you still feel like you've done something worthwhile. There's the type of nasty storm brewing that usually knocks out my satellite internet, so it might be tomorrow before I can get it submitted. I'm still struggling with the promo images, which I am really horrible at making.

 

Very Useful indeed.

 

I need this! Thank you. I hope your weather isn't too bad...so you can upload the asset, of course. Stay safe!

 

Winner of the "Simplest & Most Timesavingest Tool Of The Year" award
Cash ready and waiting XD

 

The weather never got as bad as the Weather Channel was calling for. It rained really hard, but there were no storms. My internet went out for a bit, but the signal was fine. Every once and a while satellite internet goes out just because it feels like it. Or sometimes it refuses to load any SSL sites unless you connect through a VPN. Those things are rare though.

I submitted the asset early this morning. I spent more time than I should trying to get decent promo images done. I failed miserably at that. I am not a marketing artist at all. Hopefully the functionality is enough to drive sales. During development, I found myself changing the spec map just to watch it automatically mix with the gloss map and apply itself to my model! haha. So I think people are going to like what the asset has to offer.

 

I had the very problem your tool is made for yesterday. My specular looked bad but I didn't want to go mess around in photoshop. I hope your tool is up soon.

 

Me too. If it isn't up tomorrow I have to wait all weekend. The suspense of how well it is going to sell and the irrational worry that I missed some obscure bug is killing me. I think waiting for approval is the hardest part of software development. ;-)

 

I can imagine! You will have one sale, between my daughters' prom and my son's college graduation, I will save some time to use your tool. Thanks for making this! It is really going to save me a lot of time. And try to have a good weekend, even if it is not up. It will happen eventually.

 

I'll be another sale
Now if someone could just invent a unity tool that turns a diffuse map into an albedo map + ao map, that would be great!

 

I'll likely pick it up too!

 

Well, it's the end of the day on Friday and no approval email. So I guess it'll be Monday at the earliest. I was hoping by the end of the week this asset would be approved and I'd have submitted version 2 of my fur shader. Neither of those happened so I'm gonna have a stressful weekend.

Well dang, now you've got me thinking. As if my plate wasn't full enough. Curse you! ;-)
I did find time to whip up a process in GIMP that seems like it could work for that, but I don't have time to put the output in Unity to find out. Much less to write the code to automate it. Still, if TCM goes well, it might be a nice companion product one day.

 

Heh XD
Yeah, it would be great. Every Unity user has diffuse maps, very few have albedo/ao maps - which is what we all need.
Look how dull and wan the albedo maps are http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-conversion

 

I've tried a couple of different methods for making the conversion and they all seem to have plusses and minuses. If I do ever get around to making such an asset, I'll probably give a set of options to choose the method and a little control over the output where applicable since different methods and values work better for different textures. If TCM sells well there's a good chance I'll move forward on another texture utility. When I wrote Harpoon, my normal map generator for OS X, I planned on a much larger sibling product that did a whole bunch of texture related functions. Harpoon doesn't even cover the monthly E-Junkie fee for hosting it so more work along those lines didn't seem like a safe bet until I'm more financially stable. Because of that I want to be careful from now on about saying what will and won't be done in the future.

 

Hmm, can the maths of Harpoon be turned into a normal map generator for unity? Seems you're half way to a complete texture control/map generator.
However it goes, these are welcome tools

 

It's certainly possible. I keep bouncing back and forth between thinking that TCM is going to earn me enough to pursue more assets along these lines, and thinking that it is going to have a trickle of sales that require me to keep hussleing on freelance projects or other directions. The stress of waiting for approval and those first few days of sales really is the worst part of development. Mainly because it's the one thing that is completely out of my control.

 

I'm waiting on it as well. Looks really good.

 

Might be requiring an update to this Would it be possible to take an image and save/swap individual channels?
Say I wanted green and blue only from a source image - then save those 2 channels out as a new image, or even move those two channels to red and blue, then save out the resultant image.

 

Oddly enough, I was originally planning on having it be able to load the channels from an existing texture, but I couldn't think of a use case. That's why there's a submenu under "Texture Channel Manager" with only one item. ;-)

If the product doesn't completely bomb out, that's certainly a use case that would make it worth adding that feature in. I wish I had thought of it during initial development. Although I do have an insane amount of work on my plate right now, so I don't know how immediate it would be. if I do end up making the diffuse->albedo thing, it would make sense to push some update to TCM so the two can share a menu item. A growing collection of texture utilities shouldn't all get their own item in the top menu. Your suggestion would allow me to do so without pushing an update just for a menu reorganization.

I need to finish up the update to my fur shader first, as the changes are pretty important. And a customer there has made a suggestion that might turn into a separate grass shader. Then I have an input asset I'd been working on before I needed to make changes to the fur asset (which led to the creation of TCM, which will come free with the fur shader). And all of this needs to be done before I can get back to work on the game that prompted the creation of all the assets in the first place. Plus I have a freelance gig coming up and another game I'm working on with a partner. So I'm going to be a busy bee over the next few months. ;-)

 

Well, I have really horrible news, for me. I suppose half of my horrible news is good for you guys. The 24-hour deal seems to do exactly why my asset did and the sale price is $5 cheaper. That's the first bad news. The other bad news is that I found a bug where it doesn't always behave correctly when you switch platforms. I tried to pull the asset from review so a buggy release doesn't go out, but I couldn't figure out how. I could only create a new draft.

I'm going to regroup and try again, because that's all I can do. So I'm going to spend today fixing the bug and implement @Whippets suggestion to allow which texture channel to use as the source. After the sale is over, my version will be $5 cheaper so maybe I can still salvage something from this. Especially if I create some of the companion products we've discussed in this thread. But at this point I think a beer would serve me better than the coffee I'm drinking. Well, maybe not, I've got a lot of extra work to do today.

 

I've emailed the Asset Store team asking them to pull it from review, or pull it from the store if I am too late to stop the review. But if it doesn't get stopped for some reason and anyone encountering the problem finds their way onto this thread, it can be avoided by setting the source textures to uncompressed, that way they don't get reimported on the platform change. I'm working on a fix now and will be submitting an update as soon as possible.

 

Sigh. Well, it got approved. As long as you know to set the textures to uncompressed or don't plan on switching platforms, you can grab it here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/35129

Nothing super horrible is going to happen if you do used compressed textures and switch platforms. It's more of a user experience issue. It took me longer to get started on the fix than I'd have liked, and I'm going to work all night if I have to in order to get it submitted ASAP. The new channel selector feature should be in the next release as well.

 

Version 1.1 has just been submitted with the bug fix. As long as they don't get my request to self-reject and reject the fix, everything should be good to go. I've updated the screenshots at the top with the new feature. You can see the drop down list now for all the single channel elements that allow you to choose which channel of the source image to use for that element.

I still need to reshoot the video to update it with the new feature, and mention that I changed the menu item to Window->Imperial Penguin->Texture Channel Manager to make room for additional texture assets in the future. But my eyes are dropping and I had a hard enough time saying Texture Channel Manager without getting my tongue tied when I was wide awake. So I'll let that wait a bit.