I am working with a sprite sheet that was too big to fit within a 2048 x 2048 size, which was causing problems. The reason for the size is because the animation was comprised of 108 images. I managed to use photoshop to split this animation between two sprite sheets. However, now I am not sure how to animate that.
Is there a way for me to have it animate one sprite sheet, before completing the second as one animation?
Could you describe what you have tested so far, and where it fails you?
So a few issues. First, the sprite sheet I was provided has one image per column and 108 rows. Unity cannot even read that file. It gives the error “File could not be read” on startup or any time I try and apply any sprite or texture settings. The image itself is about 485 X 41,000 pixels.
I tried remaking it to be two columns, cutting its height in half. This allowed it to be read but was very highly compressed.
Finally, I used photoshop to rearrange the sprites, and tried to get them to fit within 2048 X 2048 pixels, as I read that was a good max size to have for textures, along with being the default Max Size in the Texture Inspector. I also switched to a version where each individual sprite would be 256 pixels of width. This allowed for exactly 64 images per sprite sheet. Thus, two sprite sheets were needed for all 108 images.
Note that this did lead to a different problem as well, as I rearranged the sprites by splitting the rows for more columns, creating a sprite sheet that should be read top-to-bottom before moving to the right. But Unity reads them left-to-right and going down to the next row. I split them that way as it would be easiest. Otherwise, I would have to manually move all 108 images, which would be a nightmare. Note this is a separate problem.
you should make 108 individual images
I heard that has worse performance then a spritesheet, since it has to lookup 108 images into memory.
just use the sprite atlas feature, it creates a sprite sheet for you, with multiple pages if needed
Thank you
One last question. If I make a sprite Atlas, do i then need to keep the original sprites in the project, or does it now exist in the atlas
you keep the files on the project, whenever you reference them unity will take them from the atlas automatically