Convert sliced sprites into materials for quads

[herougan]

I want to apply sprites onto quads and I learnt that you have to convert them to materials first before applying them to quads.
However, I get my sprites from a spritemap I sliced up. I intended to make a like a tilemap for a tactics game but with the terrain built by quads instead. I did not expect that quads couldn’t accept sprites as textures.
Do I have to instead make 1 sprite one at a time, and make a material for each one?

1. Is there a way to apply sprites onto quads (Just drop it into the albedo map - oops)
2. If no, is there an automated way to convert sprites into materials
3. Can I convert a sliced sprite into multiple materials?

Thanks

Edit I am unable to have a sprite renderer and a mesh renderer at the same time. I assume I must

1. Import sprites as textures instead
2. Apply textures onto materials one at a time, or programatically
3. Apply these materials onto the mesh renderer.

There is a sprite editor that nicely lets me e.g. split a jpg into 64 smaller sprites and they are cleanly displayed as a single spritemap object. If it were simply sprites on sprite renderers, it would be so simple… Is there any way for textures/materials to be this way too?

1. I could: Have a ‘master’ material object and foldered within, many materials OR
2. The same ‘master’ but for textures and then i programmatically assign them to my quads at runtime.

What should I do?

[Kurt-Dekker]

Generally nothing above can be “converted” between each other. They are all distinct things.

To put an area of a Texture2D on a quad, generally you need to manipulate the UVs of the quad.

Otherwise, just use a Sprite and render it with a SpriteRenderer

Just to help you keep your terminology straight:

• a Texture2D is an image (think JPG or PNG)
• a Sprite is a set of coordinates (box or otherwise) outlining something interesting on a Texture2D
• SpriteRenderers render Sprites
• UI Image components render Sprites
• a “quad” (what Unity makes) is a Mesh that needs a MeshRenderer to be seen
• MeshRenderers render Meshes
• Meshes are vertices, triangles, normals, UVs.
• Meshes are not Textures
• Sprites are NOT Meshes

Beyond that:

• a Material is an instance of a Shader
• Materials have properties, such as:
  —> parameters (colors, numbers, vectors)
  —> objects such as Texture2Ds (Albedo, Normal, Emission, etc.)

And finally to complete the picture:

Unity’s component architecture

Custom GameObject

Unity scenes are made of GameObjects. They are all identical to each other. They are just empty vessels essentially. What sets them apart from each other is Components plugged into them, such as Transform and Monobehaviors. In addition to two above classes of "Unity things," there is also the notion of an Asset. References to Assets may be slotted into other Assets or into Components that are slotted into GameObjects. Assets may or may not exist on disk, or may be created in code and slo…

[Ted_Wikman]

You can set the mesh type to Full Rect in the Texture Importer settings. This will generate a quad mesh and “place the Sprite” on top of it. Isn’t this what you want?

[DragonCoder]

For clarification since Kurt’s and Ted’s replies sound contradicting regarding “meshes”:
The asset type Mesh in Unity refers to a 3D polygon net which can directly be used alongside a material in a meshfilter and meshrenderer to render it.
Sprites have a “mesh” in a more generalized sense. It’s also a polygon net but it technically is internal data of the sprite. That mesh cannot be used by a mesh renderer but only by a sprite renderer (which as its core does technically render that mesh very similarly).