Feedback Feature request: selecting multiple sprites in the sprite editor

It's not possible to select multiple sprites in the sprite editor with shift+click or ctrl+click/cmd+click.

This means, when you have a lot of sprites you need to apply changes to, and you have already put them in your scene so you can't just slice them again, you gotta manually go over each one or write a script to do it, and again, not all of the features are accessible from the API. I've talked to other 2D developers as well that share the same frustration.

So it would be really nice if we could select multiple sprites in the sprite editor.

 

"I've talked to other 2D developers as well that share the same frustration."

There's sprite metadata:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SpriteMetaData.html

Which parts exactly you can't modify?

IIRC I've modified at least pivots and names of sprites without problems using Editor scripting, although I can't remember the details... but it is doable.

 

Yeah I've had to do it with editor scripting as well. But this feels like something that should exist in the sprite editor. And it's also hard to find sprites that way if you don't want to change all sprites on a sprite sheet but specific sprites.

 

+1

 

I also want to voice my frustrations with the Sprite Editor. I'm currently trying to create collisions for a tilemap and I have to create physics shapes for each tile individually, since I can't select multiple tiles and draw the whole collider at once. This is extremely frustrating, as I constantly have to click on each tile again and again, just to make sure they all line up.

Unity desperately needs some workflow improvements for tile-based games or pixel art in general. I feel like I have to circumvent Unity's systems every few steps, just because it doesn't behave like expected. It's like it's fighting against the user. The suggestion to directly change the .meta-file says it all. How can that be an acceptable solution? Stuff like this needs to be possible from the Editor.

 

I would really love be able to select multiple sprite slices in a Multiple type texture. It would be nice to be able to select specific ones, and also like a short command for "select all" in the fashion of "Ctrl+A". I'd like this because for example sometimes I want to change all the slices pivots to the same place (for example upper left corner) without having to click each one and do the operation on each one. This would really help me with both brain and hand/wrist fatigue.

 

Is there any word on this? I am making an isometric game and I need to modify my tiles pivot point to be 32 and 16 pixels. Doing this manually is crazy, and easy to mess up. Just being able to select and modify the pivot point on multiple sprites in the sprite editor would be amazing. It would be even better to be able to input your custom pivot point in pixels when slicing the tiles. It only does % based pivot points and that doesn't work for isometric tiles that are taller than others (ie a tile with trees on it).

 

i have to upvote this! there are many aspects of sprite sheets operations, and the skinning editor (adding bone influences) related having to apply values to single elements that are just tedious and therefore error prone.

I'm working on a game that hundreds of tiles.

For example, if you could select multiple sprites and apply a single name with a sequential numbering feature, that would huge time saver, or event just a single name to grouping would be ok (and then manually numbering them).

 

There are a lot of feature in Sprite Editor which cries for API to be available.

1. If you want to set the same custom outline generation (say 1) for all the slices, you can't. You have to manually select every single slices in the sheet and then manually drag slider to be 1 and the click apply. Good luck with 100s of them.

2. The same goes for the custom physics outline.

3. Doing above using asset importer is not an option because every sprite sheet could be different.

4. Think about above scenario with 100s of sheets... Sigh...

If Sprite Editor exposes some kind of API that we can call upon, then we can at least write our own editor tool to handle situation like above. ( Or Unity creates such buttons / options for us )

And also, talking about the pivot point, I completely agree with above, we need to be able to set the pivot across all the slices in the sheets. Being able to apply across multiple sheet is also going to be real time saver.

Also we need to be able to do it using pixel unit not just normalized unit. I just can't believe after all the years of asking for this, it is still not available on slice option.

 

Thanks, but is there API to do operations such as :

1. Generate custom outline using value (0~1)
2. Generate custom physics shape using value (0~1)

 

Oh, sigh.. I get that you may hear this a lot but.. Any plan to make them public any time soon?

 

I couldn't read the whole discussion so I don't know if this has been mentioned already, but one thing that would be great is to have a list inside the sprite editor to select every sprite that has been created from the sheet. The reason is that, in the project I'm working on, we sometimes do more than one cut in the same image. But if there is a smaller cut under a bigger one the smaller cut can't be selected because the bigger cut always gets selected.

 

To clarify, you slice multiple sprites from the same area of the texture such that they overlap? One way to to select the sprites in a spritesheet is to click on the sprites in the Project tab. Each texture has the sprites associated with it listed there. Press the little arrow to see them all. When you click on one of these sprites with the Sprite Editor open, it will select that sprite within the Sprite Editor. This should help when dealing with overlapping sprites that are hard to click within the Sprite Editor itself.

 

I've done this in two situations.

(1) I want multiple pivot points. If you author the spritesheet yourself, slicing multiple sprites with different pivots allows position offsets without increased texture costs. The same may be useful may be useful on tilemaps where you don't want to manually offset the sprite's position via tilemap.SetTransformMatrix. It can be more convenient to slice multiple sprites within the Sprite Editor.

(2) Random variation. Imagine a spritesheet where there are rocks on it and between the rocks is transparency. If our goal is to create 30 varieties of clustered (3-6) rocks, you can achieve that by using the Custom Outline tool in the Sprite Editor by slicing up different assortments of rocks into unique clusters. The number of unique rocks you need to create can be small so long as you slice up different clusters into different sprites. The overall variation will look high but the amount of art required is low.

This technique only works with an manually authored spritesheet, however. When in a Sprite Atlas, it doesn't work because, iirc, it won't recognize you're slicing up overlapping parts of the same texture, so it full-copies the texture for each sprite, increasing texture cost.

 

I have a pretty simple feature request: it would be great to have a toggle that shows all colliders on the spritesheet at once. When you're trying to create colliders for tilemaps you always have to switch back and forth between the individual tiles to make sure they line up, just because you can't see the two colliders at the same time. This would be a HUGE QoL improvement.

A great bonus would be if I could create colliders for an entire spritesheet without even selecting individual sprites. Other sprite editors let you do this without problems. I basically just want to draw in my tilemap colliders on one big image instead of switching tiles all the time.

 

I got another use case, related to how Unity handles spritesheet dimensions change:

For my RPG, I'm exporting full spritesheets from Aseprite, one row per character state (e.g. Idle has 1 row with 2 sprites, Attack has 1 row with 6 sprites, Hurt has 1 row with 1 sprite, and there are many holes).

As a result, I must rename each cell with the appropriate sub-name (_idle, _attack, etc.), which would benefit from multi-select (currently, batch-editing names in the .meta file in a text editor is faster).

But the real issue comes when you add another row full of sprites for a new state. Generally you add a row at the bottom, but Unity saves sprite cell/slice coordinates with bottom-left origin. So adding a row effectively shifts all cells to the bottom. This wouldn't be much of an issue if you could select all slices and translate them upwards. Currently you must translate each of them upwards one by one. And this time, it's harder to do with a text editor (you can, but you need some plugin that interprets math operations like 20+16=36 to offset a batch of numbers by 16).

Finally, neither ctrl nor shift locks the translation axis (unlike most graphics editing apps), so when translating each cell upwards, I must be very careful not to move them along X accidentally (in fact, holding shift to lock translation to the closest cardinal axis would be a nice suggestion; do you know if there's another thread on this, or if it is already on the roadline?)

This means there is no easy way to update a spritesheet dimensions without offsetting all slices.

Ideally, we'd be able to set spritesheet update settings like the "reference origin" in case spritesheet dimensions change, in my case I would set it to top-left instead of bottom-left. But in the meantime, the ability to Select All, and even lock translation axis would allow us to fix the updated asset in a single operation.

 

Never tried for a character. In general, there are better solutions for this, like a custom tile that hashes the cell to produce a random offset within the cell, or tilemap.SetTranformMatrix. But I've used pivots like this where I don't want to mess with a more ideal solution because it's simpler to pay to slice another sprite with a slightly offset pivot.

For example, imagine a thin pole with its pivot at its base. When set to a tile, this pole will be centered on the tile cell. But if you wanted 3 variants of the positioning of the tile within the cell, then you could make 3 sprites and position the pivot slightly differently.

Another case where I've done something similar is I want to stack several boxes on top of one another and have it sort properly. One solution for this would be using a z-as-y tilemap, but I can't use that for various reasons. So I have a box with its pivot near its base, then slice the same sprite with a larger rect with its pivot below its base such that when stacked it'll be on top of the other box.

The above boxes are the exact same texture (colored in shader) sliced with different pivot points allowing me to stack them on top of one another on a tilemap (using different z-positions) without using a z-as-y tilemap. When a character walks in front/behind it sorts properly.

Also I recently upgraded and noticed that your UI/UX improvements from this thread came in so thank you for that! I love the pivot editing.

 

ya, this still needs to happen
I have massive sprite sheets and would be awesome to do grid cell + trim on all of them instantly.....

 

I don't want to use a different Transparency Sorting Axis because I need strict y-based sorting. Z-as-Y requires a different sort axis. Furthermore, because I don't use Z for sorting, I use it to send some custom per-tile info to a shader.

Finally, with pivot editing, I can choose how tall each box is. Because the pivot itself is set, I can have taller and shorter boxes. In contrast, Z-as-Y only allows integer z-values, limiting the control you have over stacking:

With pivots, it is analogous to z-as-y but with full float range. I could choose to stack 3 thin boxes into the same space as I put 2 taller boxes, or not respect z-layers at all. The disadvantage for pivots is that there's the memory cost per sprite, texture costs would increase if using a Sprite Atlas, can't stack very tall without needing to expand the sprite rect, and takes more labor to set up. It's not an ideal solution but is a nice hack for rare/special situations.

 

I would like to add that the reason grid cell + trim is better than just "automatic" is because automatic will try to make different sprites just because they have a gap in between. A gap in between is often intentional and shouldn't be different sprites. That is why a grid cell count + trim button would be good.
It would also be extremely useful to make it possible to use a script using trim. It does not seem to be possible to do that for some reason.

 

Would like to chime in. Have recently started working on a 2D game in Unity and have found the sprite editor's workflow very limited, so progress on that front would be great to see.

Multi select in particular would be very useful.

 

On my end just wanted to chime in and say custom physics shape and custom outline for multiple sprites at once seems sorely needed.

 

Wanted to chime in as well just to add that doing custom outline for multiple sprites would be great for my use case. Even better would be to have it available through a scripting API as well. Thanks Xiang for gathering all the feedback!

 

First allow me to say that i am very new with unity and its tilemap system. This post may be !=.

Custom editing my weird tile-sheet, can be massively quicker with a simple solution.

Keyboard shortcut for generate, in the Custom Physics Sprite Editor

Then I just click the cell I want, keyboard shortcut in a generate, and I am moving what I need in that cell to match the sprite.

I can apply it all later.

instead of sliding bars and jumping around, and clicking generate back and forth.

and back and forth. . .

(Basic)ly,
10 click cell, keyboard shortcut generate, move vectors
20 goto 10

With warmest regards,

WalkingCrowPeaches.

p.s. I am head over heels about your product. Unity is for samurais and rock stars. Like staff and us users.

p.s.s. maybe put the location movement bars in the custom sprite editor on the keyboard somewhere, like you do in the tilemap editor. the bars on the keys are faster. then i dont have to slide them with the mouse (stylus) anymore. or perhaps a grab hand tool in the custom sprite editor to move the scene around?

 

Sorry for the necro, After all these years @SpicyCatGames I've finally found an asset that does exactly what you want it's called Multi-Sprite Editor

 

Dammnit its paid! Why is these feature forgotten??? @Xiangting_Su

 

Is there plans for any new features to help with this?

The multi select feature has been asked about multiple times and no one has ever mentioned anything about Unity helping work on it.

The Sprite Editor lacks a lot of features that really makes working on bigger 2D projects a pain.
If there is nothing on the agenda can the community create a thread for 2D feedback to bring in some discussion on the topic?

 

I have actually given up Unity providing any useful functionality in regarding to working with many sprites using sprite editor, so I asked if Api could at least be exposed so we can create our own custom tools, but the respond I got from Unity was that they have no plan to do that and that was back in 2021...

I was merely asking if already existing function to be exposed outside so we can call that from our script but even that request was denied for some reason. Dont have plan they say? They will let me know once they get around to that? Well thats been two years... I have given up. Just dont understand it. No communication on when it will ever happen and no idea why.

 

Ok I am going to.... sigh, iterate this again.

Sprite Editor.

It's great if you are working few/ solo sprite and do operations on them. But when you are working with multiple sprites, ( I am talking about 100s, 1000s) and your game requires say outline to be created with generating parameter with 1, at the moment, you would normally then go through every one of them individually and set them. (Imagine that!)

If you want to automate this by say a.. post import script of something, or write custom editor script to batch process it, we need sprite editor's API such as command to generate custom outline, custom physics, setting pivot, etc to be exposed, so we can actually call them. Now, I am not sure if it has already been exposed or not since it has been 2 years since I have given up on it to be added, so it's very simple as that.

Just imagine working with 1000s of sprites. And any operation you want to do with Sprite Editor, like generating custom outline, physics, pivot etc. And the answer is pretty simple. I think Unity should actually try and use the Sprite Editor and deal with 1000s of sprites and process them one by one to see how difficult and time consuming the work flow is....

 

Also when you want to set custom pivot while you are slicing the sprite, there is no option to set the custom pivot using pixel unit. You can obviously use pixel unit after slicing, but you can't batch process it easily. You have to set one sprite using pixel unit, change pivot unit to float value, copy individual value into sprite slicer option and slice again to set the pivot back. I don't understand why you can not use pixel unit while you slice, when the sprite editor obviously let you use pixel unit to set individual pivot point.

 

So I apologize for my little miscommunication.
We are talking less about selecting multiple sprites via API, but just through the UI of the Sprite editor.

With the right knowledge you can create a SpriteEditorModule and add a new sub window to the Sprite Editor, but the thing is this seems like a UX/UI issue on Unity's side.

There are a lot of people that don't have the knowledge about the SpriteDataProvider or SpriteProviderFactory API.
New users or even more advance users shouldn't have to write their own editor code for something as simple as selecting multiple sprites and changing different value. You can do it for game objects in the inspector, but not sprites where they are not too different in how they are handle code wise as a sub asset of the texture file they are sliced from.

Is there a reason for almost three years now Unity devs won't even acknowledge customers who pay for multiples seats of Unity Pro to answer one simple question about this UX issue. We don't need an instant yeah we will make this feature right away, but just a simple acknowledgement about the thought of it.


Half the forums asking about this people are sent to the API or asked what API can we add so we the devs using Unity can make tools that Unity should of made a long time ago for you. If we were told it is added to a request board or even told about we could think about it that would be enough.

The problem is we are sent to a URL and told basically this "Add the feature yourself."
This honestly isn't a big change or hard to implement.
Heck just let someone make a branch and do a pull request that uses the Sprite Data Provider in the 2D extras package.