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Exporting

The Export Workbench on the right side of the screen is the main place for capture and export. It shows what has been captured, normal-map coverage, atlas estimates, validation warnings, and recent export attempts before opening the export preflight modal.

Basic Export Steps

  1. Open the Export Workbench on the right.
  2. Set your frame size, frame timing, and capture options.
  3. Capture frames with Record, Frame, or Row.
  4. Click Prepare Export.
  5. Pick a format card, review validation messages, choose atlas settings, then click Export.

Export Formats

General Purpose

  • Sprite Sheet — One or more PNG atlas pages plus JSON metadata with frame positions, sizes, page indexes, and animation names.
  • ZIP — All individual frames as separate PNG files compressed into a ZIP archive.
  • GIF — An animated GIF of the current animation sequence.

Game Engine Integrations

  • Unity — C# SpriteSheetAnimator class with frame data ready to use in a Unity project.
  • Godot — GDScript file and a .tres resource file for use with Godot's AnimatedSprite2D.
  • Bevy — Rust structs and a Cargo.toml snippet for the Bevy game engine.
  • Phaser — Phaser 3 Atlas JSON format compatible with scene.load.atlas().
  • Pygame — Python module with frame rectangles and animation helpers.
  • Raylib — C header file with frame definitions for use with raylib.
  • LÖVE 2D (Lua) — Lua module for use with the LÖVE 2D framework.
  • LÖVE 2D (anim8) — Lua module using the popular anim8 library.
  • Turbo — Format for the Turbo game engine.

Frame Configuration

In the workbench you can control:

  • Frame width / height — Output size of each frame in pixels.
  • FPS — Frames per second used when exporting animated formats (GIF, engine integrations).
  • Capture normal maps — Captures a matching camera-space normal frame when recording or adding frames. Turn this on before capturing if you want real normal data.
  • Background — Transparent or solid color background.

Atlas Settings

Atlas settings are chosen in the preflight modal and remembered as last-used settings.

  • Rows / compatible — Preserves the existing animation row order and frame order. With default atlas settings this matches the old single-page layout.
  • Packed / production — Uses deterministic packing without frame rotation to reduce wasted space. Metadata still preserves the original animation and frame order.
  • Padding — Adds empty pixels around each frame slot.
  • Extrude — Duplicates frame edge pixels around the content rect to reduce texture sampling artifacts.
  • Scale — Scales atlas frame dimensions for export. The preflight modal includes 1x, 2x, and 4x presets plus a custom numeric value.
  • Max atlas — Sets the maximum page width and height used by validation and page splitting.
  • Allow multi-page — Allows the generic Sprite Sheet exporter to write spritesheet.png, spritesheet_2.png, and so on.

Multi-page output is fully supported by the generic Sprite Sheet format. Engine exporters currently block multi-page atlases because their generated helper code expects one texture page. Increase the max atlas size, disable multi-page, or export generic Sprite Sheet when a validation warning reports that an engine format cannot safely export the plan.

Atlas-style exports also include spritesheet.manifest.json, a shared metadata file with atlas options, pages, animation names, frame rects, slot rects, normal-map references, source dimensions, and exporter id. Existing exporter-specific JSON files remain unchanged for compatibility.

Spritesheet Postprocess

The Export Workbench includes a collapsible Spritesheet Postprocess section for 2D effects that run after capture but before atlas packing. This is separate from the viewport Effects stack: viewport effects shape the 3D render, while spritesheet postprocess edits the captured 2D frames before they become atlas pages.

Available export-time 2D effects:

  • Outer Outline — Adds an alpha-based outline around each sprite. Use Smooth for softer strokes or Crisp Pixel for nearest-pixel style outlines.
  • Drop Shadow — Adds a 2D shadow using offset, blur, spread, color, and opacity.
  • Glow — Expands a colored glow from the sprite alpha.
  • Color Adjust — Applies brightness, contrast, and saturation tweaks to color frames.

Effects are ordered and can be enabled, disabled, reordered, or removed. When postprocess is disabled, exports use the captured frames unchanged.

The animated preview shows the processed sequence. Turn on Before / After to compare original and processed frames with a draggable divider. The zoom buttons in the preview are inspection-only and do not affect exported pixel dimensions.

Outline, shadow, and glow can expand each frame with transparent padding so the added pixels are not clipped. This means the sprite may appear smaller inside its frame because the exported frame is larger. The JSON and manifest frame sizes reflect the processed dimensions.

Normal Map Exports

When Capture normal maps is enabled, atlas-style exports include matching normal pages alongside the color pages. Single-page output uses spritesheet_normal.png; multi-page generic output uses spritesheet_normal.png, spritesheet_normal_2.png, and so on.

Normal maps are captured at frame creation time. Existing color-only frames do not gain real normal data just by turning the option on later; they export as transparent placeholder normal frames until you recapture or add them again with normal capture enabled.

Spritesheet postprocess effects apply to color frames only. Normal-map frames are padded to match processed color frame dimensions when needed, but their normal data is not outlined, shadowed, glowed, or color-adjusted.

The preflight modal reports normal-map coverage as Ready, Partial, or Missing. Partial and missing normal coverage does not block export because placeholder pages can still preserve the atlas layout.

Export History

The workbench stores recent successful exports in browser local storage. History records the format, filename/download intent, frame count, animation count, page count, normal status, atlas settings, and warnings. It does not modify project files and browser exports do not record a real filesystem path. The Recent Exports section is collapsible so it can stay out of the way while configuring captures.

Tips

  • Use .glb models for best animation compatibility.
  • Export at power-of-two frame sizes (64, 128, 256, 512) for best GPU texture performance.
  • Use Packed layout for production atlases with uneven sequence lengths.
  • Use Spritesheet Postprocess for clean 2D outlines or shadows after capture, especially when a 3D outline effect is too noisy.
  • The Sprite Sheet format is the most universal — all game engines can load a PNG + JSON atlas.