Import your 2D art from Photoshop into Unity as prefabs

Objective: Load your 2D art from Photoshop into Unity as prefabs

Above you can see a shot of my 2D art I have created inside of Photoshop. I used a 4K canvas and I would now like to import this into my 2D project in Unity.

The first thing you need to do inside of Photoshop is change the file type, when you save your art, make sure to save it as a Large Document Format which has the file extension of PSB. This will separate out all of the different layers you have inside of your art work into different prefabs inside of Unity. I also made to name my layers appropriately as they will have the same names inside of Unity. Before I add the document to Unity, I also make sure to turn my layers into smart objects.

Once you have your document updated and saved you can now open your project in Unity. If you’re started your project in 2D then you will probably already have the asset needed for the importing but if not, you can add the following asset via the package manager window in Unity.

Once that package is installed, then you can drag your PSB document into Unity. This may take a long time to import, it will depend on the size of your artwork. Once imported, if you see that your artwork is a little pixelated, then just adjust the max texture size of the asset.

Once the artwork has been imported you will have a prefab of the whole photoshop document.

You can see my files here. There are sprites and prefabs. If you drag one of the prefabs into the hierarchy then it will drag all of the objects. If this happens, then you will need to unpack the top prefab, in my case called “happy landscape elements”.

The good thing about importing this way, is that if you now open the artwork that is inside the Unity project in Photoshop. Then when you make updates to the artwork and save, when you go back into Unity, then the artwork will be updated in Unity. This way you do not have to keep re-importing the artwork.