Generate Sprite Animations

This is a Pro-Only Feature: you can open the Animancer Tools window to see how it works with Animancer Lite, but it will not actually produce any output unless you purchase Animancer Pro.

Unity's inbuilt method for creating Sprite animations is to Drag and Drop them into the Hierarchy window which is somewhat tedious if you need to create multiple animations, so this Tool allows you to instantly generate animations from Sprites based on their names. If you haven't given your Sprites useful names yet, the Rename Sprites tool makes it easy to do so.

Naming

This tool groups the Sprites based on their names with any numbers removed from the end. For example, selecting Sprites with the following names:

  • Dog-Idle1
  • Dog-Idle2
  • Dog2-Walk 1
  • Dog2-Walk 2
  • Dog2-Walk 3
  • Dog2-Walk 4

Would generate the following animations:

Animation Frames
Dog-Idle.anim (2 frames)
  • Dog-Idle1
  • Dog-Idle2
Dog2-Walk.anim (4 frames)
  • Dog2-Walk 1
  • Dog2-Walk 2
  • Dog2-Walk 3
  • Dog2-Walk 4

Animations are saved in the same directory as the Sprites they came from.

Drag and Drop

Unity's inbuilt method for creating Sprite animations is to drag and drop them into the Hierarchy window:

  1. Select all the Sprites you want to include in the animation.
  2. Drag and Drop them into the Hierarchy window.
  3. Use the dialogue box to choose where to save the animation and what to call it.
  4. Delete the object it created in the scene.
  5. Delete the Animator Controller it created (because you don't need them with Animancer).

The third thing it created is the animation containing those Sprites.

Animancer plays the same Animation Clips as Unity's Animator Controller system, so any of the official Unity tutorials about creating Sprite animations will still be relevant: