2019.2.0b1 Secondary Textures + SpriteAtlas

Will secondary textures support packing into an atlas in paralllel? For example, if I were to assign my sprites a normal as a secondary, would it be possible to generate another atlas automatically out of the secondary textures that exactly mirrors with packing of the primary textures?

Another feature that would really be nice is being able to generate at atlas outside the Editor, like when pulling from the web on load or supporting player-made mods. Opening the atlas up a little would make it much more viable for my needs.

Also, are 2D Lights not ready yet? I'm not seeing a specific package for it, nor a "2D Light" script as in this video, nor under any Light or 2D dropdown.

 

Is this applied on 2019.3.0?

 

Subscribing to the thread because I've been asking this question a couple of time already, so I want to be updated whenever it will happen

 

Im also using a shader graph that uses secondary textures and need the atlas packing to be exactly the same as the main textures atlas. I would like to know if this issue has been solved.

 

That's good news, thanks for the update.

 

Will it be possible to enable its use once already built for pulling from web or player-made mods?

 

our current workflow is a bunch of seperate sprites packed into a unity atlas, then we set the sprites in an animator. will it be possible to just add identical normal map sprites, generate an identical atlas from those, and add the normal map atlas as a sub atlas? i really dont want to be re-adding 3000 sprites to a bunch of animations. doing it the first time with albedo was enough.

 

2020.2? so, december more or less?

 

@Venkify
If I might ask, how do secondary textures in SpriteAtlas work from a technical standpoint? Will the sprite mesh get a second set of UVs? I made a custom system for secondary textures in sprite atlases back in 2017, but it was a pretty ugly solution, so I'm wondering how the official one will work.

 

So this means that the secondary texture will be positioned in exact same position in secondary atlas as the primary texture in primary atlas? Won't that significantly reduce the efficiency of sprite packing? Let's say there are 10 sprites in the atlas, and 5 of those sprites have a secondary texture. If UVs are to stay the same, it sounds like the secondary atlas will have just those 5 sprites with secondary textures with huge empty holes between them.

 

Seems so, but if you're to make a separate atlas for that - you have to add additional UVs to sprite's meshes, and, main problem, you will need separate shaders that will use additional UV channels.
Best thing they can make is do a toggle somewhere to switch between "same layout" and "separate layout" secondary texture packing mode, 2nd one for those who will write their own shaders

 

If you are to use secondary textures - won't you have to write your own shaders that utilize secondary textures anyway?

 

No, they are automatically applied to the material, if there is a property with same name as secondary texture. So you can use existing shaders normally

 

Except there are no official, say, normal-mapped shaders for sprites, as far as I know.

 

There are. Like, ones for 2D lights. Also, using standard shader for the sprites is fine as well. Default sprite shader do not write depth, so it don't work with post-processing effects like DOF

 

2D lights are not part of the default render pipeline. And standard shader is absolutely not fine for sprites - sprites need special shaders to support instancing, flipping and pixel snapping. Sprites with alpha textures can't really write meaningful depth in any case.

 

They can if you use discard to ignore transparent pixels. Well, that's not the problem here. Thing is they made it this way so it's compatible with current shaders out of the box, and I don't see problem with it. You can just pack sprites with normal maps and without them in different atlases.

 

Is this mean secondary texture will work with tilemap? (tilemap renderer) ?

 

Can you be more specific about which version of Unity it is expected to work? Because I am pretty sure I have tried it on tilemap renderer on Unity 2019.3 but it didn't work...

 

I am trying to use it with 2dRenderer (URP) and I am pretty sure it was not coming through... I made secondary texture and wanted to bring it through say _ReflectionAmount but it was not working as expected.

Perhaps, the issue is to do with 2DRenderer not the secondary textures.

Can you let us know in which Unity version and which rendering pipeline and what renderer this secondary texture works? Right now, this isn't very clear ... we have many types of renderers, rendering pipelines combinations which makes finding which combination works confusing.

Even the official document for the secondary texture just says it only works with Sprite renderer, (and) but does not say anything about what rendering pipeline it is expected to be used with.

 

Which version of the Unity supports secondary texture with atlas? does 2019.4 supports this? Or do I have to go with 2020 ?

 

Has this ever happen?

 

is it already implemented in 2020.2.0b9 version ??

 

Just a heads up - there is an issue that I ran into that causes Unity to crash on startup: https://forum.unity.com/threads/cra...ated-to-secondary-textures-on-atlases.996353/

The functionality of the secondary textures works great while Unity is running, and on the PC standalone build. For now as a workaround I am removing the Sprite Atlases from the project (moving the files outside of the project folder) when I need to open the project, and then adding them back in after it is opened.

 

So do normal maps work with sprite atlases now? Has anyone actually use it?

 

It works with 2DRenderer at least.

 

I'm currently trying to add a secondary texture to the sprites inside an atlas. When I add a _NormalMap (or any other secondary texture) to individual sprites, the atlas updates, but the region in the secondary atlas texture does not contain the sprite's secondary texture, but a distorted version of the main atlas texture.

I'm using the Sprite Atlas v2. Should i downgrade again?
EDIT: Also happens after switching to v1.

Sprite Atlas v2, Unity 2021.1.1f1

 

Wow. Ok that definitely seems wrong... only Unity can answer this..

 

Any idea or update on this?

 

I did not get this issue. Although I did get some issues with how the sprite atlas's normals interact with light.

EDIT: This has now been reported as a bug in this thread

 

Any chance to have the separate compression for the secondary textures atlas?

 

Is there a description somewhere for how this should work, or what it should look like?

I'm unable to tell where my secondary textures should be located, or what I need to do for them to be packed correctly. If I have my main and secondary texture for a sprite in a folder, and I pack the entire folder, will they be correctly atlased? Can I see the secondary atlas somehow? What will let me know that it's working correctly?

 

The textures that you are packing need to have the secondary texture attached to them via the normal route in the Sprite Editor. Then the secondary textures will be automatically packed together with the main textures. You will then be able to see them in a little tab in the atlas for the preview.

 

Following this 'Packing into an atlas' thread, there isn't really an answer to simple issue.

Using atlases on other textures than _MainTex doesn't really work.. is there any solution to this for custom shaders?

// in this example _MainTex and _TransisionTex should use unity texture atlases. But only _MainTex works.

 

You ever solve this issue?