Resources

Description

The Resources class allows you to find and access objects including assets.

When you build your project, all assets in any Resources folders are included in the built Player. You can then load these assets at runtime using Resources.Load. You must create the Resources folder. Unity doesn't automatically create a Resources folder when you create a project. Your project can contain multiple Resources folders.

Use Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll to locate assets and scene objects in the Editor.

One way to access assets in Unity is to expose a reference to an asset by declaring a member-variable, then assign it in the Inspector, instead of using the direct path to an asset. This allows Unity to automatically calculate which assets are used when building a Player and minimizes the size of the Player to only contain the assets used in your application. However, this method fixes the references in the Inspector which makes them less flexible.

You can use the Resources class to load assets at runtime by specifying their path as a string. For example, you might want to create a GameObject procedurally from a script and assign a texture to a procedurally generated mesh.

Some loaded assets, most notably textures, can use up memory even when no instance exists in the Scene. To reclaim this memory when the asset is no longer needed, you can use Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets.

For more information, refer to the Introduction to the Resources system.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class ExampleClass : MonoBehaviour
{
    void Start()
    {
        GameObject go = GameObject.CreatePrimitive(PrimitiveType.Plane);
        Renderer rend = go.GetComponent<Renderer>();
        rend.material.mainTexture = Resources.Load("glass") as Texture;
    }
}

Static Methods