Animating Sprites in Unity

Objective: Showing the ease at which you can animate sprites in Unity.

Let’s create a folder in our Unity Project called Sprites. Then add the sprite sheet that we will slice.

After adding the sprite sheet we need to change a few settings so we can slice it before animating it. We need to set the Texture Type to Sprite (2D and UI), Pixels Per Unit to the Pixel size of the sprite, Sprite Mode to Multiple, and Filter Mode to Point (on filter). Then hit apply. Now we can slice the sprite!

To slice the sprite there are a few options depending on the sprite you have. For this article, we will just use the Auto slice. Once the sprite is sliced click apply. If you look closely you will see there are a few “extra” squares or slices around the worm. All we need to do is to delete them and drag the big main box over the sprite so its all in one box.

Now that we have our sliced-out sprite we can animate it. Unity makes adding animation with sprites very easy. In the Project folder, you will see the sprite we made changes to. There will be a little arrow next to it, just click that and all the sprites we sliced will be there shift-click them all and drag them into the game scene. A new window will pop up asking to save it as an animation. Here you can create a new folder called Anims. Name your animation and click save. That is now you have a Game Object that has a sprite renderer and an animator ready to go!

That's it! Unity did all the work for you. You can of course animate your own sprites if need be but you probably won't need to.