How do you create your Sprite Sheets for Animations?

Unity Engine
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I’m curious about your techniques for creating sprite sheets for character animations. In my case, I draw the frames on a power-of-two canvas and then arrange them in a new file, spacing them out with a distance equivalent to the original frame canvas. This way, I can slice the sprite sheet using the original canvas size for each frame, making it easier to cut. However, sometimes I end up with oversized images with a lot of unused space.

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I know there are other ways to arrange the images based on the size of each frame, but I don’t know how to handle the slicing, and I also wouldn’t know how to set the origin of each frame if they are not all centered in the same position.

In the img I’m uploading there is an example of an animation that caused me to go from a 512 canvas to a 1024 canvas, generating a lot of unused space.

I hope someone is willing to share their workflow so i can learn how to better deal with this <3<3

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First of all, that is a delicious head explosion. Juicy!! I hope you back it up with a good sklurtch sound and a nice wet thud as the body hits the floor.

As for workflow, it really depends on the object: is it a one-and-done? Is it going to be endlessly tweaked? Frames added/ removed? etc.

Wasted space can often be drastically reduced by using a sprite atlas.

Try different things and push forward because only you will know what you are comfortable with. And don’t be afraid to use different techniques in a single project. Just be sure to leave yourself notes about what you’re doing so you can go back to it and make adjustments!

1 Like
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I already have a gore SFX library ready to enhance the animations, so definitely, don’t worry about that ^^.

Thanks for your advice. I’ll probably try the sprite Atlas once I have all the animations done.