An asset is any item that you use in your Unity project to create your game or app. Assets can represent visual or audio elements in your project, such as 3D models, textures, spritesA 2D graphic objects. If you are used to working in 3D, Sprites are essentially just standard textures but there are special techniques for combining and managing sprite textures for efficiency and convenience during development. More info
See in Glossary, sound effects, or music. Assets can also represent more abstract items such as color gradients, animation masks, or arbitrary text or numeric data for any use.
An asset might come from a file created outside of Unity, such as a 3D Model, an audio file, or an image. You can also create some types of asset in the Unity Editor, such as a ProBuilder MeshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info
See in Glossary, an Animator ControllerControls animation through Animation Layers with Animation State Machines and Animation Blend Trees, controlled by Animation Parameters. The same Animator Controller can be referenced by multiple models with Animator components. More info
See in Glossary, an Audio Mixer, or a Render TextureA special type of Texture that is created and updated at runtime. To use them, first create a new Render Texture and designate one of your Cameras to render into it. Then you can use the Render Texture in a Material just like a regular Texture. More info
See in Glossary.
The above diagram shows the typical workflow when you work with assets in Unity. Each column represents a separate step and is described below:
Importing is the process of bringing your source files into the Unity Editor to work with. When you save or copy a file into your project’s Assets
folder, Unity imports that file which allows you to work with it in the Editor.
It’s important to learn some fundamentals of importing assets into Unity, such as where the files are stored in your Project, how to adjust the Import Settings for each kind of asset, what the meta files are for, and how the Asset Database stores imported data. See Importing Assets for more detail about these topics.
You can speed up Unity’s processing of assets when working with teams by using Unity Accelerator.
Once you have imported some assets into your project, you can start creating your game or app. This typically involves placing assets into one or more ScenesA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary as GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
See in Glossary, and adding scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
See in Glossary which control how the user interacts with them.
As development on your project grows, you might need to split your assets up into separate groups which allows your game to incrementally download selected extra content at runtime.
During the creation process, you can decide a strategy on how to group your assets into separate bundles, and implement the code for choosing when to load them.
Grouping your assets into bundles allows you reduce the size of your initial download and load some assets later at runtime. This can help you optimize the download size and memory usage of your game or app. The recommended way to do this is to use Unity’s Addressables system.
Building refers to the process of exporting your completed project to binary files which you can then distribute and run on the platform of your choice. For example, when building for Windows, Unity generates an .EXE
file, along with some accompanying data files which you can then distribute.
If you’re using Addressables or Asset Bundles to group your assets into separate downloadable bundles you also need to build those bundle files for distribution.
You can build your project on your own computer, or you can use Unity’s Build Automation service which provides automated build generation and continuous integration for your Unity projects.
Once you have built your game or app and its content bundles, your users need a way to access it. Your choice of distribution method depends on the platforms that you’re targeting.
For example, mobile platforms have their own app stores, you could use a professional publisher, or you could self-host on your own servers.
Unity offers its own Cloud Content Delivery service, allowing you to host and deliver your game or app and its content to your users, and is fully integrated into the Unity development platform. This can save lots of time and is valuable for content-rich, live games or applications that require content updates on a regular basis.
When users load and use your game or app, the loading process and experience is defined by the rules and programming that you set up, and the way that you grouped and bundled your assets.
Using a combination of the techniques and services described here, you can provide fast initial downloads, and ongoing updates and extra content which you can roll out over the lifetime of your project.
Unity’s asset workflow has tools and features which make it easy to edit and design directly in the Unity Editor:
When working with assets in Unity there are different strategies you can use. Which one suits your project depends on factors such as the size of your team, the size of your project, your target platforms, the memory availability on those platforms, and whether you want to release updates, patches, and DLC after publishing it.
For example, if you are working in a team, you could use a Cache Server alongside your version controlA system for managing file changes. You can use Unity in conjunction with most common version control tools, including Perforce, Git, Mercurial and PlasticSCM. More info
See in Glossary system to cache Unity’s import results, to save time across the team.
If you are working with a large number of assets that you want to publish as separate bundles, you might find it useful to separate some of those groups of assets out into separate projects, so that members of your team don’t need to load a single huge project to work on those bundles.
If you keep all your assets in a single project, Unity automatically builds them in the correct format for the current selected platform when you run a build. However, if you split your assets across multiple projects to build your bundles separately, you must make a build for each platform you support. See the Addressables documentation Building for multiple platforms for more information.
The characteristics of a platform also determine the restrictions and possibilities of how you organize your runtime assets. For example, on the standalone platforms (PC or macOS), virtual memory provides an almost unbounded pool of memory, so using the Resources folder or large asset bundles doesn’t typically pose a memory challenge. Conversely, mobile devices and console platforms typically have limited or nonexistent virtual memory, so apps built for those platforms must manage asset loading and unloading more efficiently.
User expectations on a platform are also an important consideration. For example, on mobile platforms, a long initial download and install process can lead to players abandoning your app before they ever play it. For this reason, it’s common for mobile apps to include only a minimal set of assets in the initial build and to download the remaining assets from a remote server the first time the user runs your app.
Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
Thanks for rating this page!
What kind of problem would you like to report?
Thanks for letting us know! This page has been marked for review based on your feedback.
If you have time, you can provide more information to help us fix the problem faster.
Provide more information
You've told us this page needs code samples. If you'd like to help us further, you could provide a code sample, or tell us about what kind of code sample you'd like to see:
You've told us there are code samples on this page which don't work. If you know how to fix it, or have something better we could use instead, please let us know:
You've told us there is information missing from this page. Please tell us more about what's missing:
You've told us there is incorrect information on this page. If you know what we should change to make it correct, please tell us:
You've told us this page has unclear or confusing information. Please tell us more about what you found unclear or confusing, or let us know how we could make it clearer:
You've told us there is a spelling or grammar error on this page. Please tell us what's wrong:
You've told us this page has a problem. Please tell us more about what's wrong:
Thank you for helping to make the Unity documentation better!
Your feedback has been submitted as a ticket for our documentation team to review.
We are not able to reply to every ticket submitted.
When you visit any website, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalized web experience. Because we respect your right to privacy, you can choose not to allow some types of cookies. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings. However, blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer.
More information
These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalisation. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then some or all of these services may not function properly.
These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.
These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising. Some 3rd party video providers do not allow video views without targeting cookies. If you are experiencing difficulty viewing a video, you will need to set your cookie preferences for targeting to yes if you wish to view videos from these providers. Unity does not control this.
These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.