[OPEN SOURCE][ALPHA] MetaSprite - Blazing fast, flexible Aseprite to Unity importer

MetaSprite is an Unity plugin that lets you import Aseprite's .ase file into Unity, as Mecanim animation clips/controllers. It also has rich metadata support built in, allowing one to manipulate colliders, change transforms, send messages (and much more!) easily in Aseprite.


Feature overview

• Doesn't require external aseprite executable to run
• Blazing fast
• Efficient atlas packing
• Simple workflow, only requiring right-clicking on the sprite file and choose Import
• Extensive metadata support
  • Commented (ignored) Layers/Tags
  • Manipulate colliders/events/positions/sprite pivots using image data
  • Specify clip looping using frame tag properties
• Write custom MetaLayerProcessor for extended functionality

Source/Documentation/Download

Everything is available at github: https://github.com/WeAthFoLD/MetaSprite

I am considering making this onto the Asset Store, but intend to leave it open source and tinker until it is good enough for the production.

The project is currently in ALPHA stage, so you might encounter unexpected errors and crashes, and features are subject to change. Feel free to throw me a bunch of suggestions and feature requests!

Notes

I am a game programmer and is recently working on a pixel-art action game. After quite some experiments, the artist and I had confirmed to work on an Aseprite animation based import workflow. Originally, we export the .png atlas file from aseprite, then rebuild the sprites and keyframes and animation controller in Unity, which is a tedious and repetitive process, leading me to look for a solution to automate the process.

I've searched through existing Aseprite importer plugins. There are some that works, but either is very slow (require 5s+ to import single 30frame file), or have less-than-optimal workflow (e.g. Have to use a global config for every single ase file). The most annoying point being that every single one of them depends on an Aseprite executable to work. So I ended up deciding to write an importer on my own.

So I created MetaSprite, a Aseprite-to-Unity importer that doesn't require external Aseprite executable to run. It directly parses the .ase file binary, so it is blazing fast. I also added some useful features, enabling one to directly draw colliders / manipulate positions and perform custom actions, using special-named layers' pixel data.

The plugin's basic features are now already done, but plenty of tiny details left out, including multiple color modes, layer blend modes, better error handing, animating UI image track, etc. But the basic workflow is already fine to be tried out, and I really hope to receive more suggestions/feedbacks about the project. Do try it out and tell me what you think!