Exporting Rigged Sprite Sheets or Rendered Sprite Sheets

When creating game assets in Harmony, the first decision you should take is which type of export you intend to make:

  • Rigged Sprite Sheets is where you export a sprite sheet with one sprite for each layer in your character along with metadata allowing Unity to build and animate your character using those sprites. This is the traditional way of exporting sprite sheets, and most other Harmony features related to gaming are optimized for it.

    NOTEIn Harmony, this is simply referred to as exporting sprite sheets.

  • Rendered Sprite Sheets is when you export a sprite sheet with one sprite representing your entire character, rendered and flattened, for each animation frame in your scene. This means that Unity does not have to reproduce the way Harmony renders your character, as it is already rendered. This method creates significantly heavier packages, does not work with some other gaming features in Harmony and is harder to import in Unity, but it ensures that what you see in Harmony is also what you will see in your game.

    NOTEIn Harmony, this is referred to as exporting to Easel JS.

The following table offers a detailed comparison of all the advantages and limitations of between the traditional method of exporting sprite sheets versus exporting to Easel JS:

 

Advantages

Disadvantages

Rigged Sprite Sheets
  • Significantly lighter packages.
  • Allows you to easily import the assets in Unity using the Harmony Game SDK package.
  • Allows you to create props and anchors in Harmony.
  • Different animation clips can be separated by scene versions or can be separated with scene markers, whichever is preferred.
  • Only supports Game Bone-type deformations.
  • Does not support Curve or Envelope deformations, except if baked into frame-by-frame animations.
  • Does not support Morphing, except if baked into frame-by-frame animations.
  • Does not support any effect except for the Cutter.
  • Using cutters has several limitations.
  • The matte port of drawing layers cannot be used.

 

Rendered Sprite Sheets (Easel JS)
  • All methods of animating, including morphing, curve deformations and envelope deformations are supported.
  • Effects are supported.
  • What you see is what you get.
  • Harder to import in Unity. This format cannot be imported using the Harmony Game SDK. Developers must write their own scripts to import the exported sprite sheets.
  • Exported sprite sheets are significantly heavier in file size, which may make it unsuitable for mobile games due to file-size and bandwidth limitations.
  • Different animation clips can only be separated by scene versions.
  • Does not allow you to create prop and anchors in Harmony.