Sprite sheets and texture atlases allow animated content such as a character walk cycle to be designed with the rich tooling in Animate and then exported for integration within other game platforms, like Starling or Unity.
Here we can see this animation of a character swinging a sword inside of Animate.
Now, if we want to go ahead and export this as a sprite sheet inside of the Library, we see its movie clip symbol.
Right clicking on that allows us to Generate Sprite Sheet...
From here, we can see the Sprite Sheet itself.
We can Preview the sprite sheet and we can set a number of output options, such as the dimensions, the format, whether or not to have a background color, the algorithm and data format to use, and additional advanced options such as trimming and stacking frames.
Clicking Export will export the sprite sheet for us.
I'm going to Cancel.
The secondary export option, if we right click on this movie clip symbol again, is to generate a texture atlas.
Here's our texture atlas and once again we can Preview and also set a number of things such as dimensions, the image format, the algorithm and so forth.
Clicking Export will export this for us and the files for the texture atlas and sprite sheet will be exported in the same folder that the FLA exists within.
Here's our FLA file and here's a folder with the exported texture atlas.
If we enter here, we see a number of .
JSON files, as well as a spritemap.png.
Remember that native HTML5 targets are optimized for textures whereas flash player is optimized for vectors.
Keeping this in mind, you get all the benefits of authoring your content as vectors within Animate, including the ability to retarget and resize any content as you work through your projects while being able to publish as either vectors or textures depending upon the publish platform.
With Animate, you really get the best of both worlds.
