Animating Sprites in Unity

The topic of the day is animations in Unity, let’s talk about 2D sprite animation.
A sprite is an image that can be moved around the screen and otherwise manipulated as a single entity.

sprite sheet example

To create a 2D animation we need the set of sprites that make up the animation. I am not an artist but fortunately, on the web, you can find a lot of sprites or spritesheets ready to use.

So let’s start with the list of ingredients:
- Unity
- Animation Panel
- Group of sprites that make up the animation

In the Project panel we are going to create a folder for the animations we are going to create.
Now we are going to add the Animation tab that we will need in a moment.

We import the first sprite in the scene and rename it in my case Explosion.

After making sure it is selected, open the Animations panel and choose ‘Create’. We give a name to our animation and save it directly in the Animations folder.

Now our sprite on stage will have a new component assigned in the Inspector.

With the Animation tab open we drag all the sprites that make up our animation.

This should be the result of your animation, when we implement VFX we will go into more detail on this topic.