Hi to all,
I’m trying to self-teach games creation using Unity. I have some programming experience and 3DS Max.
I’m also learning to use Unity and would like to ask any artist / programmers the following question:
In your opinion, what is the process you use for creating sprite sheets?
What tools / process would you use for a beginning ?
As I mention, I mainly use 3DS Max, but would be open to learning another art pacakage, if this would facilitate the
process.
Thanks for your help.
Mike
To create sprite sheets you have several choices. You can use dedicated softwares completely independent of unity, you can use already existing 2D solutions for Unity that will handle that for you (SpriteManager2, ex2D, and such… plenty of them on the asset store) or you can ‘easily’ do it yourself. Essentially all these solutions are based on the PackTextures method of the Texture2D class (or a reimplementation of it) : you feed an array of textures with individual sprite states and you end up with a sprite sheet and all necessary texture coordinates informations. It’s a single line of code really to generate a sprite sheet. Using a sprite sheet is a bit more complex and require a bit more coding skills but it’s really not that much work if you know your way around coding.
In the end, whatever the solution you may chose, the art package has pretty much nothing to do with it. Use a software you are competent and comfortable with. Sprite sheets are always generated from a collection of bitmaps whether they are drawn in photoshop, Flash or rendered in 3DS or blender. Making sprite sheets by hand or directly in the art package has no sense.
Thanks Krobil. That’s very helpful. I will begin to explore some of these techniques.
Regards,
Mike