each frame contains 3 character poses (heading north, south & west) beeing animated and disposed verticaly…each pose is 48x80 pixels so the canvas ix 48x240 pixels
I want to export a horizontal spritesheet containing the 3 animations like that, on top of each other
but if I click by rows/columns, I can’t choose the width or height that I want
it’s all preset values although my canvas in s not a power of 2…I cant either input 3 as #columns
If I understand your description correctly, you have 3 poses included in each frame and 8 frames, that means your spritesheet will effectively contain 8 sprites (each one just happens to have 3 characters in it). These are not three separate 8-frame animations but just one, so the number 3 makes no sense in the context of this spritesheet. It sounds like what you want is either a single column or a single row, not 3 columns.
384 is 48 (frame width) x 8 (number of columns), calculated automatically from the settings above.
The power-of-two (POT) presets are there for convenience for use with “Best fit for texture”, as POT-sized textures usually yield better performance. You do not need to edit these numbers
If your animations have 8 frames and you want them all across one row, then the number of columns should match your number of frames. So you enter 8. Let the width auto-calculate. 384 comes from your width of 48px * 8 frames = 384px
In your case you can just choose the “horizontal strip” option. The “By Rows” and “By Columns” options are if you want to specify the number of rows or columns, creating a “matrix” of frames.
That’s because your sprite doesn’t have 3 rows. It’s 1 row with 3 animations per frame. The fact that your frame has 3 distinct characters in it is only a human distinction, as @eishiya explained.
by rows and by cols seems useless so far
Its use is if, for example, you wanted your sprite sheet to not exceed 4 frames in width, to stack them up instead.
This. That said, it should still be possible to enter 3 as the number of columns, the result would be a 3x3 spritesheet (with 3 poses per “sprite”), with the 9th frame being empty, and arranged differently from how OP seems to expect:
I literally just made a sprite sheet with 3 columns yesterday. It’s slightly buggy but just highlight the “8” and press 3 to replace the value. You can’t backspace for whatever reason
I want to make some changes to the Export Sprite Sheet, mainly to By Rows/Columns options. I would like to make easier to use the dialog, for example, if we say “By Rows” we should be able to choose:
