Why is unity not compatible with .gif files?

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I have roamed the forums, and they all say to simply import all frames individually (or as a sprite-sheet) and then turn them into an animation in unity. This is what I have been doing up till now, and that works fine. To get the motion right however, I need to create the animation in another program, and it just seems like an unnecessary chore to split up a finished gif just to re-assemble it inside unity. So out of curiosity, do any of you know the reason why unity can't simply interpret the gif and save it as a collection of sprites? Is there a better way? Thanks in advance

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Answer by Harinezumi · Feb 19, 2018 at 10:18 AM

I think it is a design decision that Unity doesn't support .gifs, most probably because artists often use higher quality image formats with better compresion, like .png. Another possible reason is that it is very easy to transform a .gif into a series of .png files and then create a sprite animation from it, see this answer, this forum thread, and this reddit.

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Rexor4321 · Feb 19, 2018 at 10:21 AM 0

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Wow, now I really got some stuff to read up on :p

Harinezumi Rexor4321 · Feb 19, 2018 at 10:33 AM 0

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Nah, at a quick glance they all seem to explain the same process, I just wanted to give various options, because maybe one explains it better.

Why is unity not compatible with .gif files?

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