ImageMagick Split and Join a Sprite Sheet

Continuing the Flixel theme that seems to be brewing here, I found a good way to transform images from full dimension art to sprite sheets. This is useful when converting an image into a sheet compatible with the Flixel tile and map system. In my case I am using it to split up background images so I can use them in Flan, the Flixel map editor. I'm just using the standard ImageMagick tools convert and montage to split and join the images, as well as some bash-fu to sort files properly. I am using Cygwin to get bash tools on my Windows machine. The first command is used to split up the main image. The only constraints here are that the resulting tiles must be square, and that they don't exceed the width limit for Flash BitmapData objects. So here we simply are cropping the image into square tiles.

convert full.png -crop 32x32 tiles.png

This will spit out a bunch of images in the current folder named tiles-%d.png where %d is the 0 based index of the tile. This also assumes that the width and height of the full.png image are divisible by 32 without remainder. The next command we need is to stitch the images back together. For this we will use the handy montage tool to tile the images into one big sheet. We just pass it a sorted list of names and tell it to make 1 row with as many columns as it needs (the x1 parameter). Sorting is not entirely necessary but using the default bash globbed format will result in tiles that should be at the end of the image randomly at the beginning (try it before this step by noting the output of `ls tiles*.png`).

files=$(ls tiles*.png | sort -t '-' -n -k 2 | tr '\n' ' ')
montage $files -tile x1 -geometry 32x32+0+0 sheet.png

If all went well we should see, inside the current directory, an image with all of our separate tile sprites in a single row in order from the original image from left to right and top to bottom. This technique is also useful for converting "liberated" sprite sheets that have more than one row, into single row sprite sheets that flixel can handle out of the box.