Sprite Sheet – Storing animation frames in one texture

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An efficient way to store 2D animation for games is to layout all the frames withing one texture called a ‘Sprite Sheet’ or ‘Texture Atlas’.
This saves resources by avoiding multiple texture loading operations and only animating the UVs of the shader to display the needed image at each frame.
Sprite Sheets are also used to pack various states of game graphics and textures for multiple objects in one file.

Creating Sprite-Sheets:
Sprite Sheets can be created manually using any image editing software,
For an automated process and more control, a specialized software like Texture Packer can be used.
And it can also be done automatically in Adobe Animate (Flash).
* There are many more solutions / scripts that will do that you can find on the web…

Creating a Sprite Sheet in Animate

Software:
Animate CC 18

To generate a Sprite Sheet (Texture Atlas) in Animate:

  1. Create a new project.
    * the type of the project doesn’t matter.
  2. Drag all your animation frames from into the Library window in Animate.
  3. Select all the frames in the Library window.
  4. RMB Click the selected frames and choose Generate Sprite Sheet.
  5. In the Generate Sprite Sheet window, set the Sprite Sheet settings, output path and press Export.

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