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

• Materials
• Custom textures