Creating animation clips from sprite sheet sequences

The traditional method of animation involved hand-drawing many images, each slightly different, which displayed quickly frame-by-frame to give the appearance of movement. For computer game animation, the term Sprite Sheet is given to the image file that contains one or more sequences of sprite frames. Unity provides tools to breakup individual sprite images in large sprite sheet files, so that individual frames, or sub-sequences of frames can be used to create Animation Clips that can become States in Animator Controller State Machines. In this recipe, we'll import and break up an open source monster sprite sheet into three animation clips for Idle, Attack, and Death that looks as shown:

Getting ready

For all the recipes in this chapter, we have prepared the sprite images you need in folder 1362_03_05. Many thanks to Rosswet Mobile for making these sprites available as Open Source at: http://www.rosswet.com/wp/?p=156.

How to do it...

To create...