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Arttista’s Sprite Sheet Exporter is the tool that allows you to convert your animations into a single image containing all frames arranged in a grid of rows and columns. It is the ideal format for transferring your motions to game engines or any application that plays animations from a sequence of frames.
Since each cell in this grid corresponds to a frame on your timeline, the size of each cell is determined precisely by the drawing area size at the moment of export.
To generate a perfect sprite sheet, the workflow is divided into three clear steps:
1. Preparing Frame Dimensions
If you originally created your animation at a high resolution (such as Full HD) and need the game sprites to be smaller (such as 256 × 256 pixels), you must first resize the project’s drawing area:
- Go to the menu Drawing → Resize.
- Set the desired width and height in pixels for the individual frame (e.g., 256 px by 256 px).
- Uncheck the option to maintain aspect ratio.
- Uncheck the “Resize all objects” option. By disabling automatic resizing, you ensure that you can frame the character manually while retaining full control over the canvas space.
2. Framing the Animation (Global Adjustment with the KF Tool)
With the drawing area reduced, your character will likely be larger than the new 256x256 pixel limit. To adjust the entire animation at once:
- Activate the Keyframe Tool (KF) by pressing key 4 (or the fourth Working Modes button on the side panel).
- Select absolutely all objects in the scene using the shortcut Shift + Ctrl + A.
- Press the key S (Scale) and resize/reposition the character so it fits perfectly inside the new drawing square.
- Crucial: Go through the timeline frame by frame and verify that the character does not exceed the boundaries during wide movements (such as running legs or stretched arms), as any element outside the drawing area will be clipped during export.
3. Configuring and Exporting the Sprite Sheet
With the animation fully contained and centered in the drawing area:
- Go to the menu Animation → Render → Sprite Sheet.
- Set the number of Columns (how many frames will be aligned horizontally in each row of the final image).
- Arttista will automatically calculate the required number of rows
and display the final dimensions the image will have.
- Practical example: For a 20-frame animation at 256 × 256 pixels exported across 5 columns, the system will create a 5-column by 4-row grid. The final consolidated image will measure exactly 1280 × 1024 pixels.
- Complete the export.
When importing this final image into your game engine, simply set it to slice the grid using the specified cell size (in this example, 256x256 px) so the game engine plays the animation exactly as you built it in Arttista.