Paper 2D Overview in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.5 Documentation

Paper 2D is Unreal Engine's gameplay and animation system that you can use to create 2D and 2D/3D hybrid projects. In this document you can read about the components of the Paper 2D system that you can use to create 2D and 2D/3D hybrid games in Unreal Engine.

Prerequisites

Enable the Paper 2D Plugin. Navigate in the Menu Bar to Edit > Plugins and locate the Paper 2D plugin in the 2D section, or by using the Search Bar. Enable the plugin and restart the editor.

Sprites

Paper 2D's primary asset type is called a Sprite. Sprites are static 2-dimensional textures that you can use to represent characters or objects, when developing projects in Unreal Engine.

Sprites often come in the form of a Sprite Sheet, or a single image file that contains many variations of the sprite, that you can use to animate characters and objects.

manny running sprite sheet example with every frame of animation

By playing the static sprites from a sprite sheet sequentially, using a Flipbook, you can animate Sprite based characters and objects.

For more information about importing and editing sprites with the Sprite Editor, please see the Paper 2D Sprites documentation.

Tiles

Tiles are 2D-textures that you can use to create the background and environment of a level.

example of tile map being used as a level

Many tiles can be imported as a single image file, and divided into individual tiles using a TileSet asset.

You can then use TileSets to build a TileMap asset, to create a 2D level or environment.

For more information about importing Tiles and creating TileSets see the Tiles documentation.

Flipbooks

You can use Flipbooks in Unreal Engine, to play a sequence of sprites to animate characters and objects in your project.

flipbook example manny running (convert:false)

After importing a sprite sheet, you can combine the extracted sprites to create a Flipbook to animate a character or object. You can then add FlipBooks directly to your character's or object's Blueprint to dynamically play animations during run time.

For more information about editing and using FlipBooks see the Flipbook documentation.

Workflow Guides

Here you can find workflow guides that you can reference when creating Paper2D projects in Unreal Engine.