How To Use Unity’s “Tile Palette” To Paint Tiles Into Your Scene

Adam Reed
4 min readJul 29, 2021

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This article directly coincides with my previous articles which can be found at the links below. I highly recommend reading them before reading this one.

And without further ado, here is how to use Unity’s “Tile Palette” editor.

[Pro Tip]

The first thing to keep in mind is that you can only edit tiles that are within the current “Active Tilemap”.

At the top of the editor, there is a series of selectable tools for you to choose from.

At the very far left we have the “Selection Tool” which when activated, allows you to select areas of the grid to view and edit in the inspector.

Next, we have the “Move Selection” tool which allows you to move any tiles that have been selected within your scene’s grid.

And next, we have the “Paintbrush” tool which allows you to use the “Active Brush” to paint tiles into your scene.

The active brush can be found beneath your Tile Palette.

Then just select which tiles you want to paint by clicking on them in the Palette menu. You can even select multiple tiles to paint at a time!

We also have the “Filled Box” tool. This allows you to hold down the left mouse button to highlight an entire rectangular area to cover with the selected tiles.

There's the “Marquee” tool which allows you to click on a tile within the grid to grab that tile and its brush. This will then turn your active brush and tile into what you selected. You can also use the Marquee tool to select a group of tiles to paint.

Then there’s the “Eraser” tool. Which as you probably guessed, erases tiles! You can highlight a larger space within the Tile Palette to give yourself a bigger eraser area.

And lastly, we have the “Flood Fill” tool which lets you paint/fill an entire area with a select tile. If an area is bordered by other tiles then the fill space will stay within that area. Otherwise, it can cover everything.

And there it is. That’s all the standard tools that are available within Unity’s “Tile Palette” and how to use them!

Check out my next article to learn about an awesome package that you can add to your project to greatly enhance your “Tile Palette’s” uses!

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Adam Reed

Hi, my name is Adam Reed and I am a software engineer specializing in Unity and C# development. Feel free to scroll through and check out some of my work!