General Settings

Particle Mode

Magic decal can be use in 2 modes. Particles or Static Meshes, while being primarily designed for particles this option allows you to use a mesh instead as they are more performant then having a looping particle system in the world however they are mainly intended for static elements.

Enable If Using Particles

If you are using particles enable this toggle. It allows you to have random texture offset per particle making it much harder to tell if there are any repeating patterns. More details in the Custom Vertex Streams section.

Local or World Position

This allows you to pick if you want the texture to follow the object around or have the object "reveal" the texture underneath, good for things like fire effects where you want it to spread and reveal new areas instead of moving the flames around.

Texture: Albedo

This will be your base color texture it is also called the Diffuse texture.

Texture: Normal

This will allow you to add fake depth/bump to your decal, do note the effect is very subtle due to the method I had to go about making the system so normal maps are very optional and not really needed.

Texture: Emission

Your standard emission texture, make sure it is a grayscale image with a range of 0-1 or if possible use a .exr texture format for even smoother colors and glows.

Texture: Alpha

Similar to the emission texture this is a grayscale texture that instead of determining brightness determines viability of the overall texture/decal.

Texture: SDF

This is an advanced texture setting that requires a bit of prior knowledge to make function properly.
Click to learn more.

This texture input is for a Signed Distance Field map. It allows you to mask the texture similar to the alpha but in a more refined way, if you have ever used Unreal Engine this type of file is how they do most of their text elements to achieve razor sharp text while using extremely small files.

You can get a lot of detail about this effect and how it is used for text elements via the great channel Ben Cloward:

Prismatic Dev also goes over how this effect is used in 3D space as well if you are wanting to learn more:

Texture: Warp

You can add a warp texture and use the warp settings to warp any of the textures above individually or all together.