Foregoing Sprite Sheets During Development?

I've been ignoring sprite sheets when importing sprites to my Unity project as I'm working on it. This is because when I have a sprite sheet and I need to make a change to one of the sprites, I end up having to replace the entire sheet with a new one, which results in having to re-edit the slices and reassign all the sprite-to-component relationships.

It seems far easier to just create one sprite per file and then, once the project is completed, go back and change all the sprites into sprite sheets.

Is this best practice or am I just totally off the mark here?

 

You can create a template sprite sheet with a bunch of blank sprites. import the sheet. setup everything/ import settings etc. Then afterward edit / overwrite those blank sprites... thats what i did. Only works if they have uniform sizes tho..

 

The best practice is to import your sprites separately to gain the benefits you're describing, and then use the SpritePacker to automatically generate a tightly packed spritesheet for the build.

You can use the Sprite Atlas system, which can reference individual sprites or folders of sprites to pack and will update when you add new sprites to the folder.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-SpriteAtlas.html
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SpriteAtlasWorkflow.html

 

Thank you, yes I also asked this question on reddit and this is what I decided I would do from now on.