Slice Stack

An Aseprite extension for sprite stacking. Each layer is one slice, the bottom layer is the bottom slice, and frames stay free for animation. The preview turns the stack the way your game draws it, and the exports are ready to load into an engine.

What it exports

• Slice sheets for engines that stack at runtime. Pick Godot (Shader-Stacker or godot-sprite-stack), GameMaker (sub-images or Stack3D), LÖVE, PICO-8 or a custom layout. Animated stacks can go on one sheet or one file per frame. A normal sheet in the same layout is optional.
• Rotation sheets for pre-rendered directions: any count from 1 to 360, with the same cell size and pivot in every cell. Set the render size in pixels and the slices are turned at that resolution, so a 40 px model can come out at 160 px with smooth diagonals. Optional shading, outline, palette snapping, normal map and depth map.
• A new Aseprite sprite you can touch up. Rendering again from the slices keeps the pixels you added or erased.
• Turntable GIFs and MagicaVoxel .vox files. .vox files with one model can be opened back as a stack.

Every export writes a JSON file with the cell size, the pivot and the layout.

Drawing help

The section view shows a vertical cut through all slices, and you can draw on it, so a post or a wall goes through many slices in one stroke. Click the preview to jump to the slice under the mouse. Extrude, copy and move ranges of slices, and focus on the current slice and the ones below it.

Nine hand-drawn examples are included: a sailing ship, a lighthouse with a turning light, a tank with a turning turret, a fountain with running water, and five small ones. The README is in English and Japanese.

Limits

The preview and the rotation sheets turn each slice with nearest-neighbor sampling, like most engines do. An engine with linear filtering or a different rotation center can be off by one pixel. .vox files are limited to 256 pixels on each side and 255 colors, and files with several models can't be imported yet.

Requirements

Aseprite 1.3.16 or newer. Tested with 1.3.18 on macOS (Apple Silicon). It is plain Lua with no native code.

License

Anything you make with it is yours, including in commercial projects, with no credit needed. Please don't share or resell the extension itself.