Introduction to spritesheet
Learn how Unity generates animation-ready spritesheets from AI-created images.
A spritesheet is a single texture that contains multiple animation frames arranged in a grid. Each frame represents a moment in time. When played sequentially, these frames create a 2D animation, such as a character action or a rotating object.
A single static image doesn’t contain enough visual information to create motion. For example, a front-facing image doesn’t show the back or sides of an object. To solve this, Unity first generates a short animation video, typically a 5-second turntable-style motion. It then samples evenly spaced frames from that video and arranges them into a 4 × 4 grid, resulting in 16 frames total.
Unity saves the generated animation video as an .mp4 file in the GeneratedAssets folder and creates a corresponding spritesheet texture that you can use to generate an animation clip.
You can generate spritesheets manually using the Sprite Generator or automatically with Assistant.
Unity creates spritesheets in the following three stages:
- Source image generation: Create or provide an image that acts as the first animation frame.
- Motion generation: Generate a short animation video, such as a turntable rotation.
- Frame extraction and layout: Sample evenly spaced frames and arrange them in a grid.