It’s not possible to select multiple sprites in the sprite editor with shift+click or ctrl+click/cmd+click.
This means, when you have a lot of sprites you need to apply changes to, and you have already put them in your scene so you can’t just slice them again, you gotta manually go over each one or write a script to do it, and again, not all of the features are accessible from the API. I’ve talked to other 2D developers as well that share the same frustration.
So it would be really nice if we could select multiple sprites in the sprite editor.
“I’ve talked to other 2D developers as well that share the same frustration.”
There’s sprite metadata:
Which parts exactly you can’t modify?
IIRC I’ve modified at least pivots and names of sprites without problems using Editor scripting, although I can’t remember the details… but it is doable.
Yeah I’ve had to do it with editor scripting as well. But this feels like something that should exist in the sprite editor. And it’s also hard to find sprites that way if you don’t want to change all sprites on a sprite sheet but specific sprites.
I also want to voice my frustrations with the Sprite Editor. I’m currently trying to create collisions for a tilemap and I have to create physics shapes for each tile individually, since I can’t select multiple tiles and draw the whole collider at once. This is extremely frustrating, as I constantly have to click on each tile again and again, just to make sure they all line up.
Unity desperately needs some workflow improvements for tile-based games or pixel art in general. I feel like I have to circumvent Unity’s systems every few steps, just because it doesn’t behave like expected. It’s like it’s fighting against the user. The suggestion to directly change the .meta-file says it all. How can that be an acceptable solution? Stuff like this needs to be possible from the Editor.
I would really love be able to select multiple sprite slices in a Multiple type texture. It would be nice to be able to select specific ones, and also like a short command for “select all” in the fashion of “Ctrl+A”. I’d like this because for example sometimes I want to change all the slices pivots to the same place (for example upper left corner) without having to click each one and do the operation on each one. This would really help me with both brain and hand/wrist fatigue.
@Zephus Thank you for your feedback! That’s another strong reason there to support multiple selections.
I can see how selecting each tile to create the physics shape individually over and over gets very tedious and time-consuming after a while. Let me feedback this to the team too.
@MotherLeopard Thank you! I can imagine many brains and hands would thank you guys for these great feedbacks. Ctrl+A or even square selection would be a great time-saver.
I would probably also not want to jump off my building when I find out my painstakingly updated upper-left corner pivots should have been lower-left corner instead.
Is there any word on this? I am making an isometric game and I need to modify my tiles pivot point to be 32 and 16 pixels. Doing this manually is crazy, and easy to mess up. Just being able to select and modify the pivot point on multiple sprites in the sprite editor would be amazing. It would be even better to be able to input your custom pivot point in pixels when slicing the tiles. It only does % based pivot points and that doesn’t work for isometric tiles that are taller than others (ie a tile with trees on it).
i have to upvote this! there are many aspects of sprite sheets operations, and the skinning editor (adding bone influences) related having to apply values to single elements that are just tedious and therefore error prone.
I’m working on a game that hundreds of tiles.
For example, if you could select multiple sprites and apply a single name with a sequential numbering feature, that would huge time saver, or event just a single name to grouping would be ok (and then manually numbering them).
There are a lot of feature in Sprite Editor which cries for API to be available.
If you want to set the same custom outline generation (say 1) for all the slices, you can’t. You have to manually select every single slices in the sheet and then manually drag slider to be 1 and the click apply. Good luck with 100s of them.
The same goes for the custom physics outline.
Doing above using asset importer is not an option because every sprite sheet could be different.
Think about above scenario with 100s of sheets… Sigh…
If Sprite Editor exposes some kind of API that we can call upon, then we can at least write our own editor tool to handle situation like above. ( Or Unity creates such buttons / options for us )
And also, talking about the pivot point, I completely agree with above, we need to be able to set the pivot across all the slices in the sheets. Being able to apply across multiple sheet is also going to be real time saver.
Also we need to be able to do it using pixel unit not just normalized unit. I just can’t believe after all the years of asking for this, it is still not available on slice option.
Thank you for all your feedback, it is great that you share the workflows you are using and where it fails, so that we can walk these steps ourselves to confirm and validate any ideas we have on improving the toolset.
We do have some APIs exposed, however, the documentation is lacking. Have a look at this post I made earlier to get some ideas on how to work with the API.
Let us know how it goes! and thanks again for the feedback!
While we are looking into how we could improve the Sprite Editor Window in future versions of the editor, we do not have anything to share with you all at this moment. We’ll let you know once we have an update in this area. And do keep the feedback coming, it really helps us understand the wide variety of workflows you all are using.
I couldn’t read the whole discussion so I don’t know if this has been mentioned already, but one thing that would be great is to have a list inside the sprite editor to select every sprite that has been created from the sheet. The reason is that, in the project I’m working on, we sometimes do more than one cut in the same image. But if there is a smaller cut under a bigger one the smaller cut can’t be selected because the bigger cut always gets selected.
To clarify, you slice multiple sprites from the same area of the texture such that they overlap? One way to to select the sprites in a spritesheet is to click on the sprites in the Project tab. Each texture has the sprites associated with it listed there. Press the little arrow to see them all. When you click on one of these sprites with the Sprite Editoropen, it will select that sprite within the Sprite Editor. This should help when dealing with overlapping sprites that are hard to click within the Sprite Editor itself.
Thanks @lucassivolella for the feedback, I’ve noted it down as something we should consider. In the meantime, you can give @Lo-renzo s solution a go, which should help you with selections within the Sprite Editor.
It certainly looks like it would be helpful to be able to multi-select Sprites.