Textures painting dark?

Hello all. I have recently started a project and have tried to make my own textures/materials. I can import them, and turn them into materials, but when I actually try to put them on an object they turn out to be solid black/brown. Anyone have any idea about this?

 

If you are using unity 5, when you create a material using the new shaders, you are sending the texture to the "Albedo" slot, right?

Did you try changing the color on the Albedo? It will change the texture too. Maybe this is what you are doing wrong.

Do you have lighting on your scene? You probably do but asking doesn't hurt.

Other thing.. try to apply your textures to a simple cube and see if they will show up. If yes, then maybe your model has Uv problems.

 

Is your material set to metallic, either via the metallic setting or via setting the albedo dark and specular up? If so, do you have anything for the metal to reflect? If not, than it will be pretty much black.

The skybox and lighting settings have much to do with this. If you have a mostly black skybox with stars(like space scene or similar), then unless you do something specific, the metal won't have much at all to reflect, and therefore the metal won't be much but black because of lacking something ambient to reflect. So, you need to either make a different skybox, make a cubemap to use instead of the skybox(note that this doesn't have to be seen directly, rather only used for ambient lighting), and apply this in the lighting dialog, or make sure the world is highly populated with stuff, and reflection probes, in order to give you something to have reflected on the metal. Remember that metal is generally black as far as diffuse light goes, so for metal to have something besides that, it needs reflections.

 

When applied to a basic cube, they apply correctly. Must be a UV problem then. I'm new to blender, any possible reasons for this?

 

We would need to see the model to see if it is a UV problem, though it is a possibility that it is a UV problem. Have you actually created a UV map for the model.

 

No, I haven't. I'm new to 3D modelling in general, and didn't see anything about a UV map in tutorials.

 

Yup, that could be a big issue. Shaders, including the standard shader, if you are using any textures, depend on UV mapping. If you were doing only a single color via the material panel, you wouldn't need a UV, as the UV coordinates are used to determine what part of the texture is mapped onto what part of the model. As it is, I'm not sure what part or what Unity's shader is doing if there is no UV map, if all UVs are set to 0, 0, or if things just get black, I don't know.

The default Unity cube has a UV map, and so it doesn't have this problem. I recommend you learn how to UV map your models if you intend on creating your own. This will always be an important part of the process unless you intend to never use actual textures on your models(which could work for some game styles I guess).