The Advanced Tab¶
The Basic tab holds the essentials — load a prefab, light it, frame it, export. Advanced is where you reach when the capture needs something Basic doesn't offer: hiding part of the model, making a material glow, putting a custom shader behind the subject.
Most of what lives here has a page of its own, because it belongs to a bigger workflow. This page covers the three panels that only exist on Advanced, and points at the rest.
Everything here is preview-only
The three panels documented below all operate on the preview instance and on material copies. Your prefab asset and your .mat files are never modified — toggle a child object off, crank an emission colour, swap a background shader, and the project on disk is untouched. Close the window and nothing has changed but your exports.
What's on the tab¶
| Panel | Documented |
|---|---|
| Attachment Toggles | here — below |
| Material Overrides | here — below |
| Background Material | here — below |
| Framing Options | Framing & Camera |
| Background Style | Backgrounds & Styling |
| Studio Lighting | Lighting & Studio Presets |
| Global Volume | Post-Processing |
| Text & Logo Overlays | Backgrounds & Styling |
| Batch Editing & Multi-Prefab Export | Batch Exporting |
Attachment Toggles¶
Turn any child object of your prefab on or off before you capture.
This is the panel that turns one prefab into a set of sprites. A character with a helmet, a backpack, and a weapon is four exports, not four prefabs: capture the full model, untick the helmet, capture again, untick the backpack, capture again. Damage states, equipment variants, seasonal props, a vehicle with and without its cargo — all the same move.
The panel lists the loaded prefab's hierarchy as a scrollable tree. Tick or untick any entry to show or hide that object in the preview, and the live preview updates immediately so you can see what you're about to capture.
Nested structures work. Children of children are listed too — expand a row with the arrow to reach what's underneath. Rows that have nothing to disclose get no arrow, so the tree never implies depth that isn't there.
Hiding a parent hides its children
Untick a parent and everything below it goes with it, exactly as it would in Unity's own hierarchy. The nested rows stay collapsed while the parent is off, because toggling them individually wouldn't change what you capture.
Each toggle is a normal Unity undo step, so Ctrl+Z puts a child back if you untick the wrong one.
Lights inside the prefab¶
If a child object carries a Light component, expanding its row reveals controls for it:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Intensity | Brightness of the light |
| Range | How far the light reaches |
| Color | Colour tint |
| Shadows | Shadow mode for that light |
These are the prefab's own lights — a torch on a wall, a glowing rune, the headlights on a vehicle — not the studio rig. For the three-point rig that lights the whole subject, see Lighting & Studio Presets.
No children, no tree
If the loaded prefab has no child objects, the panel says so rather than showing an empty box. A single-mesh prop has nothing to toggle.
Material Overrides¶
Adjust the loaded prefab's materials for the capture, without touching the original assets.
Snap works on copies of your materials in the preview scene. The header says so plainly — Original .mat files are never modified — and it's worth taking at face value: nothing you do in this panel can damage your project's materials. Experiment freely.
The panel lists every renderer on the prefab and every material slot on it, headed Renderer: <name> / Material Slot <n>, with a count at the top. Past six slots the list becomes scrollable so a complex prefab doesn't push the rest of the tab off screen.
Base colour¶
Materials exposing a _Color or _BaseColor property get a colour field. That covers the standard shaders across all three pipelines — Built-in's Standard, URP's Lit and Unlit, and HDRP's equivalents.
Useful for recolouring a prop for a variant sprite without authoring a second material: capture the crate in brown, set the colour to grey, capture again.
Emission¶
Materials exposing _EmissionColor get an emission block:
- Enable Emission toggles the material's
_EMISSIONkeyword, along with its GI flags. - Emission Color sets the colour and strength of the glow.
This is how you make a sprite's lights read as on — screens, runes, engine glow, hot metal. Emission also interacts with Post-Processing: with bloom enabled in the volume, an emissive material blooms in the captured sprite.
Emission and flat albedo don't mix
If you're exporting with Flat Albedo for normal-mapped 2D lighting, the albedo pass is deliberately unlit — emission won't appear in it, because the whole point of that pass is to carry no lighting information. Bake the glow in your game's lighting instead, or export a normal capture without flat albedo.
Show Shader Properties¶
A debug toggle that lists the shader's property names for the selected material. Reach for it when a material you expected to be editable shows no colour or emission field — the property list tells you what the shader actually exposes, and therefore why Snap isn't offering a control for it.
Background Material¶
Put a custom shader behind the subject.
Backgrounds & Styling covers the built-in background modes — transparent, solid, gradient, texture. This panel goes a step further and lets you assign your own material to the background quad.
- Custom Material — the material to apply.
- Material Override — the toggle that actually applies it. Assign a material and enable the override; assigning alone does nothing.
- Material Properties — a live editor for the assigned material's shader properties, so you can tune the backdrop and watch the preview update.
As everywhere else on this tab, the material you assign is cloned. The panel says so: this is a cloned material instance; edits persist safely without touching the original asset. Tune a gradient shader here and the asset in your project keeps its original values.
It needs a background quad
The panel reports plainly if there's no background quad in the preview scene, or no renderer on it. That normally means the background mode is set to transparent — pick a visible background mode first, then assign the material.
Next steps¶
- Making variants from one prefab? Combine Attachment Toggles with Batch Exporting — set the toggles, export, change them, export again into the same folder.
- Want the glow to bloom? Post-Processing covers the volume setup that makes emissive materials read properly.
- Lighting the sprite in-game instead? Normal Maps & Flat Albedo exports surface information for URP's 2D dynamic lighting.