Setting up a Tile Palette in Unity

Here I will discuss the steps I use to create a tile palette in Unity from a 2d image.

First lets get the image file ready by slicing it up. The particular image I’m going to use represents ground tiles, each one is 16 X 16 pixels. In order to get started, you need to select the image and change sprite mode to Multiple. Next, I change the pixels per unit to 16, so that each tile will represent one unit in the world. After that, I use the sprite editor to slice the pixels.

In the sprite editor, under the slice menu, change the type to grid by cell size, with a cell size of 16 X 16, then slice them up. These steps can be seen below:

Another thing I do is set the Max Size to be just big enough to fit the dimensions of the image. This will help if you are getting blurry tiles. Here I will set it to 1024. The image size is 624 X 608, so 1024 is the next size up from 512 that will fit these dimensions:

Once you have processed/sliced the image the way you want it, its time to create the palette. Start by pulling up the palette window if its not already on screen. This can be found under Window->2D->Tile Palette:

Next, from the tile palette window we create a new palette. This is done by clicking on Create new Palette and giving it a name. Unity will prompt you for where you want to save the palette:

With the new palette created, now all you need to do is add the images to the palette. This can be done by simply dragging the image from above over to the tile palette window. You will be prompted to specify where you want the tiles generated into. See below:

After the tiles are generated, they will appear in the palette area. Here’s the final Palette, time to start painting:

That’s all there is to it!