I have a sprite character sheet which is a grid with 4x9 sprite slots.
There are 3 rows for attack up, down, right, 3 rows for idle, 3 rows for walk. Until now I had 1 free slot on each of my attack animations because the only used 3 sprites each. I went into Photoshop and added a fourth sprite for each of them. Then in Unity I had to reslice the sprite for it to detect my 3 new sprites. But now all my existing sprites got new names and all my animations now refer to the wrong sprites. Is there a better way for doing this?
This is a very iterative process so I will no doubt do this dozens if not hundreds of times so I can’t continue doing it like this. My first thought was that I have to split up my sheet into separate rows. So instead of 1 file I have 9 files with each animation in a separate file. I prefer having everything in one file in Photoshop, but if I have to do this I will. Are there downsides to doing it this way? Performance loss of having 9 files instead of 1? Ideally I would like a better way of adding new sprites to my existing sprite sheets without breaking everything. It still feels quite cumbersome working with sprite sheet animations in Unity. The animation editor in particular is not very suited for the task.
Are there some documentation / best practices for this?