Using a custom mesh with a sprite?

Is it possible to apply a sprite to a custom mesh?

 

No, the idea of sprites is that they create their own meshes.

--Eric

 

Ok thanks

 

You can, if you are using the whole "Sprite" texture, but not the individual sprites that you trim. First, create a new Material, now assign your Sprite as the texture input, it will accept it, but it won't display the transparency properly, to fix that, you need to click the Shader drop down list, and go to "Sprites>Default". It will now have your sprite, with the transparency, taking advantage of the Sprite shader's efficiency. Even the pixel-based selection of it will work, not allowing you to select the object if you click a transparent area of it.

 

It's not a sprite anymore if you do that. By "sprite" I mean an object using a SpriteRenderer component. An actual sprite has no mesh property and it's not possible to access the mesh. If you don't use a SpriteRenderer component then it's just a texture on a mesh, which has been possible forever, and won't have any of the specific sprite functionality. The pixel-based selection is standard for any object with a transparent shader.

--Eric

 

I also want to generate custom sprite mesh, but find that Unity does not support custom sprite mesh generation algorithm for SpriteRenderer. So I guess I have to use MeshRenderer instead of SpriteRenderer.

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Sprite.OverrideGeometry.html
necro, but still useful to someone

 

I keep coming back to this thread from time to time, so here are my two cents:
@Invertex answer is perfect for advanced users that want to use shared meshes. Despite not having a sprite renderer, it will pretty much behave visually as a a sprite renderer would, but of course you need to handle it differently as it lacks some of the sprite renderer methods (and has other of its own).
@pointcache the OverrideGeometry is an improvement, but with a slightly different workflow. It is likely preferable to having to deal with meshes, but might be easier to use with other tools/scripts that make mesh manipulations for example.

• In the case of the mesh approach you should build the mesh (using local object coordinates) and then set it as the sharedMesh of the MeshFilter for each object (don't create multiple meshes if they are all the same!);
• When using the override geometry, a new sprite must be created with a rect corresponding to its bounds (also using local object coordinates), and then set it as the sprite of the SpriteRenderer for each object (don't create multiple sprites if they are all the same!).

EDIT: Forgot another good use case for the mesh approach: When you need multiple textures to reuse the same mesh, that is not possible with sprites. You would need to construct multiple sprites, thus not being able to share the geometry amongst several of them.