Quick Icon Studio


Turn prefabs into a consistent set of inventory icons: batch-rendered transparent PNGs with measured framing, outline, shadow and background layers, imported as ready-to-use sprites.


by Krykftn | Advanced Editor Tools & Systems


Price History +

Every inventory game needs the same thing: one icon per item, all of them consistent. Rendering them by hand means redoing the lot every time an item changes, and every icon renderer that frames from the bounding box produces icons that are small, and differently small for every prop.

This studio renders the icon, measures where the pixels actually landed, corrects the camera by exactly the measured error, and renders again. The margin you set refers to the silhouette. Measured across deliberately different shapes - a tall box, a small sphere, a wide capsule - all land within a fraction of a pixel of the requested margin, and every batch prints its worst margin error so the claim is checkable on your own set.

WHAT YOU DO

Open the studio, add prefabs, tune the style against a live preview, export. The PNGs are imported as single sprites with alpha-is-transparency on and mipmaps off, ready to drop into an Image or SpriteRenderer. The preview is the real renderer at 256 pixels - what the window shows is what the batch writes.

THE STYLE LAYERS

• Outline: a contour of chosen width and colour, following the silhouette at a true pixel distance. An outline asked at six pixels measures six pixels.

• Shadow: the silhouette offset at a chosen angle and distance, with soft falloff and opacity.

• Background: transparent, solid, circle, or rounded rectangle with corner radius and inset.

• Light: a fixed key and fill rig with a flat ambient override, so a batch is lit identically whatever scene is open. Your scene's lighting is overridden for the render and restored afterwards - nothing in the scene is touched.

CONSISTENCY YOU CAN CHECK

• The same prefab with the same style produces byte-identical output.

• Rendering happens on a reserved layer far from the origin; the scene and its objects are left exactly as they were.

• A prefab with no visible renderer is reported in words - an empty file is never written silently.

FROM CODE TOO

Everything the window does is public API:

var style = new IconStyle { Size = 512, Margin = 0.12f, OutlineWidth = 6 };

IconBatch.Run(prefabs, style, "Assets/Icons");

Wire it into your build pipeline and icons regenerate with the items.

MEASURED

The numbers quoted here come from the automated checks that ship with the package, run on Unity 2022.3.62f2: margin error 0.14 px at 256 across three deliberately different shapes; outline width measured exactly as asked; distance field at 1024 in 54 ms; two renders byte-identical; import verified clean on a bare project. Each check was verified by deliberately breaking the code and confirming the check caught it.

REQUIREMENTS

• Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer

• Editor-only; no runtime code, no dependencies, no accounts

• Built-in fully verified; URP and HDRP render through the documented SubmitRenderRequest path

LIMITS

Orthographic camera only in 1.0. Animation is not sampled - prefabs render in their default state. Icons are square. The outline follows the alpha silhouette, including interior holes.