Best Sprite Sheet workflow in Unreal Engine - Paper 2D Tutorial

importing and using Sprite sheets and Ireland in the regular way isn't as fast and intuitive as it could be but did you know that it also supports Sprite sheet Imports using Json and another file format called paper 2D Sprites this will allow you to generate flipbooks for all of your animations with the click of a button and will also make updating sheets a lot easier I'll show you how you can create these files with a Sprite and texture Packer and how we can use them in Unreal Engine if you're drawing your own Sprites in a Sprite you should make sure to tag your animations so Unreal Engine will be able to tell apart which frames are for which flipbook but even if you're using Sprite sheets you find online you can bring these into a Sprite for a better workflow you can simply click on import Sprite sheet set up the width and height and your Sprite sheet will be cut into separate frames here you can now select the frames of each animation and add a tag by right-clicking the top bar and selecting new tag once you've done this for all animations click on file and Export Sprite sheet under the layout tab for Sheet type I usually use packed since this makes it more compact under the Sprite tab we need to select split tags to Auto generate our flipbooks under the output tab we want to check output file to Output the PNG and also check Json data under meta keep all of the options checked for this drop down we can either use hash or array both of them will work in the case of Unreal Engine then just click on export and it will output the files in the folder of your current a Sprite project you can then just drag the Json file into the content raw which will import all of your Sprites no need to drag and drop the PNG file since this is done automatically this will create a folder with your frames and a folder for your textures it also creates a Sprite sheet asset you can just right click it and select create flipbooks to generate all of your animations in one click if this doesn't work for you you probably made a mistake setting your tags the frames per second settings on your flipbook might be too high or too low we can just select all of them right click and go to bulk edit via property Matrix select all of them again and set the correct frames per second and now if flipbooks are ready to be used in your game now while making our game we will probably want to make adjustments to certain frames over time and apply these to the game I'll just change the hair color on the idle animation for demonstration then just export with the same settings as before now we can just drag the Json file into the content drawer again this will instantly update the frames without breaking anything even if we're using paper ZD and have Adam notify set up this won't cause any issues you can also add additional frames to your animations in a Sprite export to Json again and import into Unreal Engine without any issues however in this case your flipbook won't automatically add that frame and you have to manually add it which isn't that big of a deal though I hope you understand how much this can improve your workflow and save you time on Long projects lastly let's take a look at how we can use texture Packer to generate Json or paper to these Sprites files texture Packer is a paid software however there is a 7 day free trial for texture Packer if you have a completed Sprite sheet you'll first need to split it this will output all the frames one by one you'll then have to create a separate folder for each animation now we can distract the parent folder into texture Packer don't drag these folders in individually because that will break flipbook generation at the top right we can select the file format you want to Output to here we can select Unreal Engine paper 2D we then need to set the path to Output the file to lastly click on publish Sprite sheet then you can just drag in the paper to the Sprites file like we did for our Json last time and you can then generate the flipbooks from the Sprite sheet asset in texture packet for the file output format you can also just select Json hash or Json array instead of paper to these Sprites and it will work just the same so I'm not quite sure why they decided to make a proprietary file type I hope this will improve your workflow with Sprite sheets and Unreal Engine especially when working with top down games that have a lot of frames I believe this will save you a huge amount of time as always thanks to my patrons for supporting the creation of videos like these foreign

Channel: Cobra Code

Views: 13,527

Keywords: game development, unreal engine, gamedev, ue4, ue5, game dev, paper 2d, unreal engine paper 2d, unreal engine 5 paper 2d, paper 2d tutorial, paper 2d sprite, unreal engine sprites, unreal engine sprite sheet, paper 2d sprite sheet, paper 2d json, paperzd, unreal engine paperzd, unreal engine paperzd tutorial, unreal engine 2d tutorial

Id: UiMUTf2kCSs

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023