Introduction to the 2D World of Unity - Unity 2D Game Development - page 6

Unity 4.3 now has the texture type of Sprite . You can find this by selecting the
Platform texture file in the Project tab and looking over at the inspector. With the
project in 2D defaults, it will automatically import textures in Sprite mode—which
you can see at the top of the inspector. Most of these options will already be set
properly, but let's change the texture Max Size to 512 and Format to 16 bits . A size of
512 makes sure that Unity recognizes the image as anything up to 512 x 512 before it
resizes it to something smaller. 16 bits makes sure it's an uncompressed image which
allows trillions of possible colors. That's kind of an overkill in most cases for classic
2D sprites; however, many modern sprites share similarities with modern high-
resolution textures for 3D games. Unity also doesn't have a setting for 8-bit imagery,
so 16-bit is a great setting to use! Compression? That tries to literally compress the
image to take up less space, at the penalty of a lower quality image. In most cases,
you won't want a compressed image. However, it will have its uses. Now, if you
wanted your art to look more pixelated, set Filter Mode to Point . Otherwise, give
Bilinear or Trilinear filtering a shot to add some excellent smoothing to the visuals.
The following screenshot shows what the import settings should look like for your
sprite platform:
When creating images for a 2D game in Unity or any modern game engine, be
careful not to use true gradients. You can use gradients, but the image map will need
to have its format set to Truecolor to look proper. Otherwise, the gradient will look
like a set of hard-colored segments. While the Truecolor property allows the image
to render properly, it takes up more space in video memory.
To get this platform into your scene, simply drag the platform image from the
Project tab and drop it into the Scene tab or the Hierarchy tab. It auto-magically
appears within the scene. Make sure its position in the scene is X: 0, Y: 0, Z: 0
and its scale is X: 1, Y: 1, Z: 1 .