Introduction to Tilemap in Unity

Objective: Set up Tilemap for the Project

Firstly we set up the interface layout to work in. If you are missing the Tile Palette go to Window, 2D, Tile Palette to bring it up then dock it next to the scene view. Next right-click in the hierarchy and select 2D object, Tilemap. This gives us a grid. The grid is where we paint the environment.

In the hierarchy we have a grid with a child object tilemap. The tilemap can be seen as a layer. We will have multiple layers in the environment such as forground, background and so on.

Next we look at the palette. The palette holds all of the sprites we can paint.

Palettes can be create to sperate sprites into layers. Notice above we have renamed the first tilemap which is the active tilemap to Ground_Tilemap. To match this we can create a Ground Palette to hold all the ground related sprites. To populate the palette open the sprite object.

Before we can place this in the palette we need to slice the image into tiles. To do this we change the sprite mode from single to multiple and apply. Next open the sprite editor and go to slice. The sprite image was designed to that the sizing would be 128 by 128. Other sprites will vary. Go to slice, change type to by cell size and enter the measurements before clicking slice.

Notice above the effect and slice of the sprite. If it worked as expected click on apply if not click revert and maybe try a difference setting. Change the setting in sprite mode, pixels per unit to match the size that you used to slice.

Notice the sprite image has now become a set of sprites.

Select and drag into the palette and save in a structured manner i.e Tilemap/Tiles/Ground. We now have a workable set of tile assets that we can use to paint.