I often work in the multimedia environment Max/Pd, where a common way to create animations in a 2D scene is to layer video. The background might be a full screen video with little animated elements, a video with alpha of an animated border element or character might be layered on top. UI elements would just be mixed in and around the video layers. Two questions:
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Would sprite-sheets replace videos with alpha in a Unity workflow?
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I’ve seen references to animated textures. Other than renderTexture are animated textures just a name for the textures that render the sprite-sheets, or are they something else?
You are free to use videos with alpha within Unity as well. Sprite sheets can be used to overlay animated elements, but they can only take a very limited number of frames. Unity 5.6 will introduce a proper video playing component, until then you are better off using an asset (I personally use AVPro Video), as MovieTexture is practically useless in a desktop environment.
There’s no such thing as “animated textures” - render textures can indeed store any kind of texture content, including camera outputs. Textures however don’t “render sprite sheets” - sprites are quads, which are rendered by a camera, and many images to be displayed as separate sprites which are packed together into a single image are called a sprite sheet.
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Thank you Mr. Mountainborn! When you refer to a frame limit with sprite sheets, are you referring to a physical constraint? i.e. - if the sheet is limitied to 4096 x 4096, you just can’t jam very many frames of any serious size onto the sheet?
AVPro Video looks really good, thank you for cluing me into that. It looks like our best option, since 5.6 might drop a little to late for us.
Yep, the actual texture size. There isn’t a limit imposed by the Unity on the amount of sprites which can be fit into a single sheet or anything like that.
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