# How to Export Seamless Pixel-Art Loops to Unreal Engine 5 *2026-10-24 — Development — By Kim* > Bit Studio's Unreal Engine 5 plugin plays pixel-art scenes live instead of as video or flipbooks: install the plugin, use Export > Unreal: send to in Bit Studio, and drag the scene into a level. It loops seamlessly, recolors at runtime, lights the world through Lumen and fires Blueprint events. Bit Studio is coming to Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux. Bit Studio comes with a native plugin for Unreal Engine 5. You put the plugin in your project, send a scene over from Bit Studio, drag it into a level, and it plays there live, pixel for pixel, looping forever. No video and no flipbook in between. You need two things: Bit Studio itself, which is coming to Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux, and the free plugin from the [Bit Studio page](/bit-studio). The Steam page isn't up yet. Join the [Discord](https://discord.gg/KhsFPF4eQF) and you'll hear the day it is. ## Why not just a video? The old Bit Animation Editor exported to Unreal too, through the engine's own 2D tools: Paper2D sprites and flipbooks. We learned the hard way in [Lunar Soil](/games/lunar-soil) how much complexity and performance that costs. A flipbook of 360 frames at 512×512 is about 370 MB uncompressed. Video is smaller, but it has no alpha, can't be recolored, can't light the room around it and hitches at the loop seam. So the plugin does what the web export does. It evaluates the scene every frame it changes and draws it on the GPU with [Blastwave's](/news/blastwave-cross-platform-gpu-engine) own shaders, into a small texture on a card. Bit Studio, our games and the plugin all run the same player code, so what you see in Unreal matches the app exactly, and a scene costs one textured card. ![A neon grid of machine parts with rings of spinning Unreal logos and ships sweeping across, a wide Bit Studio loop](/bit-studio/scenes/export-pixel-art-loops-to-unreal-engine-5/poster.webp) That's the scene from the top of this post, playing live in your browser through the web export. In Unreal the plugin draws it the same way, frame for frame, on a card in your level. ## Setting it up Unzip the plugin into your project's `Plugins/` folder, turn on Bit Studio in Edit > Plugins and restart the editor. It's a source plugin, so your project compiles it. It's made for Unreal Engine 5.8 and has been tested on Windows and Linux, in the editor and in packaged games. ## Sending a scene over With the Unreal editor open, Bit Studio's Export menu gets a row for every open project that has the plugin: Export > Unreal: send to *your project*. There's nothing to configure. The scene lands in the project's `BitStudioSource/` folder and is imported right away, and if you export it again later the same asset is updated. No editor open? Export > Unreal (.bitscene file)... writes the file wherever you want, and you drag it into a Content Browser. A `.bitscene` is one file with everything inside: the scene, its sprite sheets, masks, the text, the music loop and every theme. Sheets are shared when they're imported, so ten scenes that use the same gear only pay for that gear once. ## Putting it in the world Drag the scene asset into a level and you get a card. Pick a preset: Screen is an unlit picture for screens and signs, and its glow lights the room through Lumen. Sprite is cut out and lit by the world plus its own lights. Lit is cut out and lit by the world only. Cards can billboard toward the camera and fade with distance. For the UI there's a Bit Studio Image widget in UMG, with exact colors and no tonemapper messing with them. ![Pump Triangle playing live in Unreal Engine 5, its red glow lighting the room through Lumen](/images/bit-studio/unreal/lumen-pump-triangle.png) ## Hooking it into gameplay Events fire on their own, there's nothing to set up. `OnLoop` every time the scene loops, `OnClipCycle` when one part's own loop restarts, and `OnBeat` and `OnBar` if the scene has music. The other way around, you can switch or blend themes at runtime with `SetTheme`, `SetThemeBlend` and `SetThemeColors` (free, nothing gets rebuilt), hide clips with `SetClipVisible`, or swap the whole scene with a crossfade using `SetSceneAsync`. There's a server clock for multiplayer too, so every client sees the same frame and gets the same events. When you package the game, every imported scene comes along by itself. ![One Bit Studio scene in four themes in Unreal Engine 5](/images/bit-studio/unreal/examples-theme-swaps.png) ## Try the examples The plugin ships with example maps under Plugins > Bit Studio Content > Examples > Maps. Press Play and use the keys 1 to 0 to switch levels: an alley lit by neon signs through Lumen, events driving gameplay, theme blends and a UMG gallery. There's more about the app in the [Bit Studio announcement](/news/bit-studio-coming-soon), and the artwork is playing live on the [Bit Studio page](/bit-studio). --- *Canonical URL: https://morgondag.io/news/export-pixel-art-loops-to-unreal-engine-5*