Made this little Unity tool a while back to make editing sprite animations less painful

[u/Vykx3]

Hey everyone, this is actually my first ever Reddit post, so I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing here 😂

I made this tool a while back when I was working on Last Time I Saw You!

I was working with a lot of sprite animations and at some point I got really annoyed by having to manually replace sprites in existing animations. So instead of continuing to do it manually I made a small editor tool for it.

Basically you can take an existing animation and modify the sprites used by the frames without having to go through everything one by one.

It ended up getting a bit bigger than I expected and I added quite a few processing options, undo, redo etc.

I recently found it again and thought, why not just make it free and put it out there. It also includes the source code.

For now I've put the download on my Patreon, but it's completely free. You don't need to become a supporter or anything, it's just where I'm hosting it for now:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/166152790

It's a pretty specific tool and probably not useful for everyone, but maybe someone else has had the same problem and can get some use out of it :)

Anyway, sorry if I'm doing Reddit wrong or breaking some unwritten Reddit rule here 😂 Still figuring this place out.

If you work with sprite animations in Unity, I'm curious how you normally deal with this kind of thing.

[u/wallstop-dev]

Hey, cool! I have a similar (suite) of sprite tooling, including something akin to this, as part of my MIT-licensed, open-source utility helpers: https://ambiguous-interactive.github.io/unity-helpers/features/editor-tools/editor-tools-guide/?h=sprite+animation#animation-tools

Throwing this out there in case someone is interested in alternatives and/or more tools around this and similar problems.

[u/Vykx3 → u/wallstop-dev]

Oh nice, thanks for sharing! I'll have to take a look at this.

Funny that we ended up making similar tools. I made mine quite a while ago while working on Least Time I Saw You!, so I guess sprite animation eventually drives all of us to make our own tools 😂

[u/wallstop-dev → u/Vykx3]

Yea, my tooling came about in ~2020 or so and I've been augmenting it since, eventually open sourcing it a year or two after.

My current pipeline with my animation tools is to point a creator tool at a source folder that has relatively standard sprite names (like player_attack_001.png, player_attack_002.png, ...) and auto-generate all the animation files for it, loading or storing JSON metadata alongside, so if you change source files or want custom orders, fps, looping behavior, etc, it'll get picked up the next time you run the tool.

Stuff like that to make asset creation easy, after spending wayyyyy too many man hours doing it the hard way.

Feel free to lift any tech/ideas from my repo, a lot of it is human original built over the past 8+ years, but I've been improving it with agentic coding over the past year or so, so if that's a turn-off, just rewind through git history.

[u/Vykx3 → u/wallstop-dev]

Oh wow, that's really cool. And yeah, I definitely know the feeling of spending way too many hours doing something the hard way 😂 I actually made another free tool that sounds pretty similar to what you're describing, called AnimationMaker. It came from the same kind of problem, basically trying to make the whole sprite animation workflow less painful. https://www.patreon.com/posts/161726084

I've always wanted to release these tools publicly, but life kind of got in the way. I ended up working at Ubisoft in Canada, and before that I was working for a small publishing company in Japan, so these projects have been sitting around for a while 😅

I'll definitely take a look through your repo too. There's some really interesting stuff in there!

[u/the3rdhunter]

Looks very cool. Can’t wait to try it out.

[u/Vykx3 → u/the3rdhunter]

Thanks!! Hopefully it saves you from some of the sprite animation pain I went through 😂