[Paper2D] Learning the Ropes

Hey guys!

Trying to learn the Paper 2D tools to make a side scroller.
I followed the Introduction video series to the tools (found here. I recommend watching it). But it didn’t go in-depth as such on the different tools.

I wanted to try and use a sprite sheet a little more exciting. So I went on the internet and found this sweet Archer sprite sheet.

But I am not sure how to actually make it work. It of course first says that 720x1018 is not a power of two. Then I tried, just for curiosity sake, to make it 720x1080. Surely this should work but still considered not a power of two.
But even then, I tried to just extract sprites and nothing useful came out of it. It’s probably because I have no alpha channel…?

Some help would be nice! :slight_smile:

Hi Vipar,

In 4.8 you can open the texture asset and tell it to pad the texture out to a power of 2 and chroma key away your background color, but those options aren’t available in 4.7. You can actually ignore the power of 2 warning if you have to, but to fix the colored background you need to use an external paint program such as Photoshop or Paint.NET. Use the selection tool (typically looks like a magic wand) to select the background and delete it (set it to ‘global’ if you can, that way it will select the green pixels in closed regions too). While you’re in there, expand it out to 1024x1024. Once you’ve done that, save it and reimport it to Unreal.

You should now be able to use extract sprites, but I’d actually recommend giving the Edit Source Region mode a try. In this mode you can just Ctrl+Drag to create a new sprite. Either way, you’ll probably have to play with the source UV and source dimension, or manually adjust the pivot in order to have the animations line up since they’re all over the place in that sprite sheet.

This part will be easier in 4.8 too as there’s now a dialog-based extraction tool, where you can type in the width/height and number of cells. You could just use that a few times to pull out each row.

Cheers,
Michael Noland

Forgot to mention that you can also double-click on a group of pixels to make a sprite from it in the Source Edit Mode (this works in a similar way to the extract sprites option actually).

Cheers,
Michael Noland

Okay thanks Michael. Any ETA on 4.8?
I’ll try photoshop meanwhile.

Those particular features are already in the main branch, but I don’t have any update on the timeline for 4.8.

Cheers,
Michael Noland