The Prefab Icon Studio is a powerful tool for creating high-quality icons and thumbnails for your Unity projects. With its intuitive interface, you can customize and preview your prefabs in real-time, making it easy to create stunning visuals for your game or application.
Key features include:
- Real-time preview window with full rotation, zoom, and offset control
- Animator support for choosing animations, scrubbing frames, or playing in real-time
- Particle simulation for previewing and baking particles at any frame
- UI overlay support for rendering UI layers above and below the prefab
- Orthographic and perspective camera modes
- Custom background colors and lighting controls
- Save to PNG with transparency and auto-import as Unity Sprite
The studio also includes a UI overlay prefab system, settings save/load, and example usage documentation. It's perfect for creating asset store icons, inventory item previews, card and ability thumbnails, and stylized UI integration with prefab renders.
To use the Prefab Icon Studio, simply drag in any prefab with or without Animator/Particles, customize the camera, lights, and UI, and click 'Save Icon' to export as PNG.
Requirements:
- Unity 2021.3+
- Built-in, URP, or HDRP (any render pipeline)
- Layer named 'UI' for UI canvas rendering
Notes:
- UI Prefabs: Place IconCreatorUIPreset.prefab and IconCreatorUIPresetBefore.prefab in Assets/Resources/
- Customize UI overlays with your own design
- Generated images are saved with transparent backgrounds
The Prefab Icon Studio is built using EditorWindow and PreviewRenderUtility. Key technical details include:
- Custom Unity Editor window with real-time preview window
- Background color customization
- Camera support with perspective and orthographic modes, adjustable zoom, rotation, and position offset
- Animation support with Animator component support, manual frame scrubbing, and real-time playback
- Particle support with simulation and preview at any frame
- UI overlay rendering with two canvas layers (Before and After) rendered via separate UI cameras
- PreviewRenderUtility-based lighting with two directional lights and adjustable intensity and color
- Auto-imported as Sprite asset
- Image export with combination of 3 render textures: prefab, UI before, and UI after
- Alpha blending for UI layers
- Final image saved as PNG with transparency
- Stores UI prefabs in Resources folder
- Saves window configuration as JSON
- Requires 'UI' layer for correct canvas rendering
- Compatible with Unity 2021.3 LTS and newer, works with Built-in, URP, and HDRP
