Pixel Art Studio Documentation

Pixel Art Studio is a Blender add-on for pixel perfect pixel art texture painting. It supports drawing and painting pixel art inside Blender, in the 3D Viewport on top of the model (in Object and Edit modes) and in 2D in the Image Editor. It has tools for drawing and painting (including colors, palettes, layers, pressure sensitivity, bucket fill, gradients), selecting and moving pixels, and quickly setting up the model and the viewport for pixel art. The plugin also helps with setting up and managing multiple texture densities per mesh, allowing for uniform pixel sizes across the whole mesh or per face pixel size variation.

Summary of features:

  • Pixel perfect drawing and painting pixel art tools: brush / pencil, eraser, line, rectangle, ellipse, bucket fill (by pixels, by selected faces, by color), blur, gradient (with dithering options), opacity, color picker, pressure sensitivity.

    • All tools have pixel perfect line handling algorithms.

  • Pixel selection: rectangle, ellipse, lasso, magic wand, invert selection.

    • The selection tools work on the 2D and 3D viewports, and you can drag selected pixels across the faces of the model.

  • 2D and 3D viewport pixel grid overlay.

  • Mirror and symmetry drawing on the 2D and 3D viewports.

  • Color swatches and color palettes (and a palette library with more than 500 predefined palettes).

  • Layers and layer management with locking, grouping, merging and visibility toggling, similar to painting programs.

  • One-click pixel size and pixel density setup with predefined presets, as well texel density detection for existing meshes (you can have chunky pixels and fine, detailed pixels).

  • One-click setup buttons to setup the viewport for pixel art (grid size and snapping adjusted to the pixel size) and to UV unwrap the model for instant pixel art painting (notice: auto UV unwrapping is very basic, for the majority of models you are still going to need to manually unwrap UVs).

  • Density Zones (optional): assign and manage texel density values per face, allowing for uniform pixel size across the whole mesh or different pixel sizes per face.

    • Different density zones automatically resizes Blender’s grid on the fly, when you hover different faces of the model, in the 3D viewport.

See Pixel Art Studio features in details for detailed information about each feature.

Where to get it

See the Installation page.

How to use it

See the Quickstart Tutorial page.

Need help?

See the Support page.