Loading Assets
Out-of-band assets in Rive Unity
Last updated
Out-of-band assets in Rive Unity
Last updated
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See the runtime documentation for more information on loading assets out-of-band.
Only embedded and referenced assets are supported in Rive Unity; hosted assets are not currently supported.
Only png image assets are supported. Support for webp and jpeg is in progress.
Within the Rive Editor, you can select an asset (for example, an image or font) in the Asset Panel and configure the export option for that asset. A Rive file can have a mixture of embedded, referenced, and hosted assets.
Embedded assets are included with the exported .riv binary file, while referenced assets are packaged separately and must be linked at runtime. Using referenced assets enables you to reuse the same asset across multiple animation files or in other parts of your game. This reduces the size of your .riv file and the resources needed to run your animations that use a shared asset.
Any asset marked as embedded will automatically be loaded, and you do not need to do anything to configure the asset.
By selecting the riv file you'll get information on the file's assets in the Unity Inspector. The example image above shows an embedded font called "Roboto Flex" with a size of 1MB.
Referenced assets need to be linked at runtime. The rive-unity package automatically handles the linking by attempting to find assets within the same directory that match the correct Name + ID combination. If an asset that matches the criteria is discovered, that asset is automatically converted to a Rive asset and linked.
For an asset to be discoverable and linked, the riv file and asset must be in the same Unity directory.
When exporting your runtime file from the Rive Editor, the .riv file and referenced assets are exported in a zip.
The extracted zip has an acqua_text.riv file with a referenced asset named Roboto Flex-887377.ttf. The referenced asset file name breaks down as such:
Name: Roboto Flex
ID: 887377
Selecting both files (or the entire folder) and dragging them into the Unity Assets folder will automatically link the embedded font file - if the Name + ID matches what the .riv file expects.
In the Unity Inspector for the Rive file, you can note that the Asset for the "Roboto Flex" font has been linked, and the Roboto Flex font file has also been converted to a Rive asset.
This example automatically converted and linked the font file because the animation and font files were added simultaneously. Alternatively, you can add the asset file first and then the riv file.; this will result in the same outcome.
If an asset was added after the riv file, you'll need to manually reimport the riv file by right-clicking it and selecting Reimport.
Alternatively, you can set the desired Importer for an asset by selecting the correct option in the Inspector. This means you can make an asset a Rive Asset or change back an incorrectly converted asset.
Reusing the same asset in your Rive files should result in a consistent Name + ID generation when exporting from the Rive Editor.
If a matching asset is not found when importing in Unity, there is a fallback to converting and linking a file that matches only the Name. You can optionally use this approach to have more control over asset importing, as an asset filename can be renamed in the Rive Editor.
