Sprite Assets
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What Are Sprite Assets?
Basically any image can be exported into a sprite asset and to be used as such, but when you want to higher quality standards there is quite many things that needs to be taken into account before proceeding to produce the finalized versions. The term ‘sprite’ is in many ways similar to ‘texture’ but the difference is generally that sprite graphic is dedicated to appear as it’s own entity in the field of vision and texture is a bitmap projected onto some surface of another object like 3D mesh.
Sprite Sheet Atlas
While sprites can be imported as a single files into any project, they are known to be used in ‘sets’ to provide more dynamic workflow control and provide good amount of asset loading optimization in game projects. How to generate a specific sprite sheet is tied completely to a project and it’s requirements. Best case of use is to generate sets that will contain all the required components to provide the final graphics onto the screen.
Color Channels
When working with sprite assets a question often comes to mind and that is how to use the color channels. Many softwares are capable to add color channels top of any sprites, but the basics of color study already tells that it is practically impossible to convert top color layer into something else if the base color has been defined. Using the grey-scale method can give you wide range of modifications, but example light will add always new color layer and this will once again limit the color range when working purely grey-scale based objects.
Alpha Channel
Using the alpha channel in a sprite file give some extra weight into it due to fact it activates a completely new channel to be initiated along with it, however there are ways to specify a certain color channel to act as an alpha channel. This is known traditionally the ‘green channel’ or ‘magenta channel’ but when you have a sprite that has the color green in it it will lead to some modifications and once you meet the all the colors that are used to define the putative alpha channel you might have to just simply go for the dedicated alpha channel.
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