Documentation

Unity Engine

User Manual

Script Reference

Unity Engine

Load and unload assets with the Resources system

Add assets to the Resources folder and use the Resources API to load and unload them.
Read time 2 minutesLast updated a month ago
To load assets with the Resources system:
  1. Create a new folder called 
    Resources
    in your project, and add assets to it. Unity then makes these assets available even if they're not directly referenced in a scene. Note: You can have multiple 
    Resources
    folders located in different subfolders within your 
    Assets
    folder, and packages can also contain 
    Resources
    folders.
  2. Whenever you want to load an asset from one of these folders, call 
    Resources.Load
     in your code. Only assets in the 
    Resources
    folder can be accessed in this way.
For example, you can apply the following script to load and apply a texture to it:
using UnityEngine;public class LoadTexture : MonoBehaviour{    // Reference a material to apply the texture to    public Renderer targetRenderer;    void Start()    {        // Load a texture from the Textures folder inside the Resources folder        Texture2D loadedTexture = Resources.Load<Texture2D>("Textures/MyTexture");        if (loadedTexture != null)        {            // Apply the loaded texture to the material of the target renderer            targetRenderer.material.mainTexture = loadedTexture;            Debug.Log("Texture successfully loaded and applied.");        }        else        {            Debug.LogError("Failed to load texture from Resources.");        }    }}
Unity stores all assets in the 
Resources
folders and their dependencies in a file in the build output called 
resources.assets
. If a scene in the build references an asset, Unity serializes that asset into a 
sharedAssets*.assets
file instead.
Additional assets might end up in the 
resources.assets
file if they're dependencies. For example, a material in the 
Resources
folder might reference a texture outside of the 
Resources
folder. In that case the texture is also included in the 
resources.assets
file, but isn't available to load directly.

Unload assets

If you want to destroy objects that 
Resources.Load
 loaded before loading another scene, call 
Object.Destroy
 on them. To recover memory used by unreferenced objects, use 
Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets
.

Additional resources