How to Blockout Colors Quickly

Fill by Face Selection in Edit Mode

If you want to block out colors quickly, filling big areas of the mesh with a single color, you can use the Bucket tool in Face mode:

  1. Select the Bucket tool (Shift+Alt+F)

  2. Click Face to fill by faces instead of by pixels

  3. Go to Edit Mode, select the faces you want to fill with a single color

    • Also make sure you are in the correct Pixel Art Studio layer or create a new one

  4. Choose a color and fill the faces with a single click on the model with the bucket tool!

  • With no face selected (or in Object Mode), it fills every face of the model.

  • The texels the edges of the faces only partly cover are filled too, so diagonal edges are filled all the way to the geometry, with no stair step of empty texels to clean up later.

  • If you made a pixel selection before, the fill stays inside it.

Fill by using Pixel Selection

You can also fill areas of the mesh with a single color by using the pixel selection tools, using the Bucket tool in Pixel mode and then unchecking Contiguous and increasing the Tolerance to fill more pixels at once:

  1. Make selections with any of the selection tools

    • Hold Shift to add to the selection

  2. Select the Bucket tool (Shift+Alt+F) and make sure Pixel is on

  3. Untoggle Contiguous to fill every matching pixel in the selection

  4. Increase the Tolerance, so it doesn’t filter by the color underneath (1.00 fills everything inside the selection)

  5. Choose a color and fill the pixels with a single click inside the selection with the bucket tool

Note

Pixel mode reads the active layer only. On an empty layer every texel has the same color (transparent), so even with a low Tolerance the whole selection gets filled.

Fill the Half Pixels Along Diagonal Edges

_images/blockout-topology-fill.png

Along a diagonal UV edge, a selection made on the model is a staircase of whole texels, and the half covered texels along the edge stay empty (they show as a jagged line of the color underneath). Three ways to fill them:

  • Bucket in Face mode (first section above): it fills them already.

  • Bucket Bleed at 0.5: in Pixel mode, the fill also reaches the half covered texels next to it, and nothing else (see Bleed).

  • Select by Topology, to fill exactly the area you select:

    1. In the 3D Viewport, arm a selection tool and turn Topology on

    2. Select over the faces: the selection turns orange and takes the half covered texels too

    3. Select the Bucket tool (Shift+Alt+F) in Pixel mode, untoggle Contiguous and increase the Tolerance to 1.00

    4. Choose a color and click inside the selection

    5. Turn Topology off again before you move pixels (a topology selection can’t be moved)

See Select by Topology for more details.

Blockout with Patterns and Texture

_images/blockout-patterns.png

The Bucket works with fill patterns and Color Jitter too, so a whole face can get a dither, a noise or a hand placed looking texture in one click:

  1. Open the Brushes and Patterns panel and pick a pattern under Pattern: (Checker 50%, Dither 25%, Noise, or one of your own)

  2. Set the primary color (the pattern’s set texels) and the secondary color (the gaps)

    • Toggle Transparent (the ghost icon) to leave the gaps untouched, and lay the pattern over a color you already filled

  3. Fill with the Bucket, in Face or in Pixel mode

  • Noise with a low Density and a higher Clump is great for grass, grime and rust.

  • Color Jitter (in Colors and Palettes) scatters shades of the color, or a few of your swatches, over the fill: set it to Shades and fill the planks of a crate, for example.

  • The patterns are locked to the pixel grid, so two fills next to each other meet without a seam.

See Brushes and Patterns for every pattern setting.