Blender To Pixels
A downloadable tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux
What does Blender to Pixels do?
This tool allows you to create and animate 3D models and then easily turn them into pixel art.
Why use it?
I've been creating pixel art professionally for 4 years, and something that always bothered me was the lack of simulation and animation tools. The standard pixel art process is hand drawn, hand animated. There is no doubt that this creates the best results, but it is also extremely time consuming, and making any changes mid-process requires hours of work.
Moving the majority of the creation process into Blender allows for easy animation, editing, and design, while maintaining most of the style and charm of traditional pixel art.
Should I use this for all pixel art?
By no means can this replace good old fashioned hand drawn pixel art, but it can make your workflow many many times faster. Depending on the level of refinement you want, you can use a render as-is out of the compositor, or use it as a baseline for cleaning up and perfecting.
Features:
- Up to 8 separate color ramps for different materials
- Automatic dithering
- Clean and customizable outlines
- Depth based filters
- Special effects filters
- In-editor documentation
Use cases:
- Full image/animation creation
- Rapid design prototyping
- Accurate lighting guide
- Physics based animations
- Procedural pixel art designs
Examples:
Traditional vs. Rendered
Hand made pixel art piece. Took ~20 hours from start to finish.
Rendered scene with clean up. Took less than 3 hours from start to finish.
While there is a clear difference in quality, there is also an extreme difference in time spent. On top of the time saved in simply creating a still image, the rendered image can be animated in minutes, while the hand made piece would take days to animate.
Animation and Modification
Rendered crown with complex rotation in 3D space.
Rendered crown spinning with different style and size.
The complex motion in the first image was made by changing just three values, and rendered in seconds.
The second image uses the same model and materials as the first, but uses a different shading style and pixel resolution. Making these changes took less than 5 minutes.
How is this different from other 3D -> Pixel Art tools?
There are other pieces of software/blender addons that convert 3D into pixel art. This project is actually based on some free tools sourced from https://lospec.com/blender-toolkit/.
What makes this different from other tools is that it is entirely compositor based. You don't need to worry about making special models or custom materials/modifiers. Everything is handled post-render. This means that you can take any 3D model from anywhere, change one value in the material setting, and have that model render as pixel art. As a matter of fact, the crown used in the examples is a free model from the internet. Lots of work has gone into improving and streamlining the 3D -> Pixel Art process, including advanced image clean up, outlining, a depth based fog filter, and a special effect filter. Because everything is Blender Node based, everything can be seen and edited as you wish. I have also provided documentation about getting started with the tool, descriptions of how it works, and best practices for getting the most out of it.
Is this free?
Yes. Many other 3D -> Pixel Art tools are paid, or rely on other paid software. You can download and use this 100% for free, including the software it is made for.
This was a difficult decision for me, after using the tool for a while and realizing how valuable it is, especially to freelance artists like myself, I considered making it a paid tool. But, after all the help and resources the 3D and Pixel Art communities have given me over the years, doing that just wouldn't feel right. If I end up creating more content for this beyond what it already has, I may charge for those, but this base tool will always be free. Just enter a zero in the price box.
If you absolutely love this and want to give back somehow, donations are always welcome.
Contact info:
You can find me on Discord: astropulse
Want to see more of my work? Head over to my website: https://astropulse.co/
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
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