Assign a channel-packed texture to a URP material

In the Lit and Complex Lit shaders in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), you can use a single RGBA texture for the metallic, smoothness, and occlusion properties. This technique is called channel packing or texture packing.

Follow these steps:

  1. Create a texture with the following channels:

    Channel Property
    Red Metallic
    Green Occlusion
    Blue Not used
    Alpha Smoothness

  2. Import the texture.

  3. In the Inspector window for the texture, disable sRGB (Color Texture).

  4. Assign the texture to the Metallic and Occlusion properties of the material. Unity automatically uses the correct channels from the texture.

You can use Shader Graph instead if you pack channels in textures differently.

Additional resources