Creating and applying a cookie texture to a spotlight

Cookie Textures can work well with Unity Spotlights to simulate shadows coming from projectors, windows, and so on. An example of this would be for the bars of a prison window.

In this recipe, we'll create and apply a cookie Texture suitable to use with Unity Spotlights:

Getting ready

If you don't have access to an image editor, or prefer to skip the Texture map elaboration in order to focus on the implementation, we have provided the prepared cookie image file called spotCookie.tif inside the 07_02 folder.

How to do it...

To create and apply a cookie texture to a spotlight, follow these steps:

1. In your image editor, create a new 512 x 512 greyscale pixel image.
2. Ensure that the border is completely black by setting the brush tool color to black and drawing around the four edges of the image. Then, draw some criss-crossed lines. Save your image, naming it spotCookie:

3. Import your image file to Unity and select it in the Project panel.

4. From the Inspector...