TextMesh Pro TMPro Recognizing Sprite Asset But Rendering as Invisible and Throwing Error

Hello all!

I was reimplementing an old sprite asset I created a little while ago in TextMesh Pro, but I can't get it to work, despite having success with it in the past (though that was with world space TMP, and I've since switched to TMP UI). When I add the sprite tag, such as

<sprite index=0>

the tag disappears, presumably because it's rendering it, but no sprite shows up. The console starts to throw a NullReferenceException as soon as I finish entering the last character of the tag:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

TMPro.TMP_Text.CalculatePreferredValues

Would really appreciate some help on this since I don't really know how to troubleshoot this further on my own. I've attached a screenshot of the error in editor. I'm currently on Unity 2021.3.6f1 on an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro.

 

Hi @Stephan_B, here are the screenshots you asked for! There are multiple pages of glyphs, so I didn't screen grab every single one. Let me know if there's any additional information you need! Thanks!

 

Hey @Stephan_B!

I went ahead and tried your suggestion, but it still renders as an empty space. I've included screenshots of the text input assigned to "A <sprite=1> B" as well as the sprite asset assigned to the local sprite asset variable. I'm curious if the material assigned to the sprite asset might have something to do with it? Right now it's using the

TextMeshPro/Sprite

material.

 

Hey @Stephan_B! So I recreated the sprite asset from scratch (and also reimported the TMP Essential Resources), and that seems to have fixed the issue? I also had to restart my Unity project after doing this, cause it was throwing a bunch of errors before and still not rendering the sprite asset. No idea if there was a meta file issue that got fixed or something, but yeah, it looks like it's working now. I'll let you know if any other issues crop up from this!

 

Looks like I may have spoke too soon. While this new sprite asset does seem to be working, sometimes it continues to throw the

NullReferenceException

(s) mentioned at the top of this thread and then doesn't update changes made to the asset, such as global offset and whatnot. It continues to work, but seems extremely unstable. I don't know if this is a deeper issue that can only be fixed with a future update or what, but I'll continue to keep an eye on it.

 

So after a day of it working semi-reliably, I realized that for some reason the sprite asset's meta file won't update, so any changes I make to it won't be reflected in my source control. Again, I don't know if this is some lingering issue with the sprite asset itself or possibly the

Resources/Sprite Assets

directory. In either event, I seem to be back at square one, since the sprite asset is back to its old ways of not rendering. I can roll back to a point where it was working earlier today, but that doesn't address the issue of the meta file refusing to update, so the sprite asset renders pretty small inline. Would love any help with this!

 

Can do! I'll send this your way sometime today.

 

Hey Stephan!

No, the sprite asset wasn't missing the reference to the texture for me. That missing reference probably happened when I sent you the files. If you try to change the point size or the scale for the sprite asset under the face info heading, will that info be reflected in the sprite asset's meta file? Cause that is still the issue for me.

Thanks!

 

Ok, it looks like the sprite asset finally updated! It wasn't showing up in the diff in my git client before, but now it seems to be. Thanks!