Pixor manual

Pixor turns 3D art into pixel art. The results look hand-pixelled, are deterministic (the same project gives the same pixels every time, and on another machine almost always: see the FAQ), and use no generative AI.

The app is four steps, left to right: Scene (set up the 3D objects), Action (make the actions, as nodes, played smoothly in 3D), Style (choose how the pixels are made) and Asset (cut the actions into sprite frames, and pack them into sheets and files). A simple job goes through them in that order; a bigger one goes back and forth as it needs. Beside the workspace tabs, the header’s Camera, Action, Style and Asset selects choose what every step shows; Export, beside Import, opens the window that writes an Asset pipeline into a folder.

Each step’s workspace carries its own panels and nothing else. The Outliner, the 3D View and the Scene graph belong to Scene; the Actions list, the 3D View, the Action graph, a Timeline that plays and keys them and the Clip editor belong to Action; the Styles list, the 2D View and the Style graph (its node library down its left) belong to Style; the Assets list, the 2D View and the Asset graph that cuts actions into sprite lists and packs them into files (a Timeline behind it, for picking frames by hand) belong to Asset. The Inspector and History are in all four, and the Inspector shows whatever that step is about. The Panels menu adds any panel the step serves, and you can drag any panel anywhere you like — Reset the panels puts them back.

This manual describes Pixor as it is built today. The plan is docs/roadmap.md; the manual follows the app, not the plan.

• Quick start: from a model to a sprite sheet in five minutes.
• The scene: the four steps and their workspaces, moving around in 3D, cameras, lights and shapes, actions and keys, undo history.
• The Scene graph and blueprints: crowds and arrays as a graph, everything in the scene as a node, and a recipe you can run on any model.
• Pictures and words: images and text in the scene, 3D letters, and a palette taken from a picture.
• Volumes: smoke, fire and liquids from .vdb files, or built in.
• Worlds: terrain, grass, leaves, water, clouds, wind, light shafts, times of day and big maps in chunks.
• Settings: every setting in the Inspector, with before and after images.
• The Style graph: from the camera’s render to the frame, every stage a node, to rewire, mask and mix.
• The Asset graph: Sprites nodes that cut actions into frames, and frames into files as a graph — several sheets from one render, lines beside colours, and text files from a template.
• Exporting to engines: Godot, Unity, GameMaker, Aseprite, and plain sheets with JSON.
• Command line: pxr render, pxr batch, projects, golden tests.
• FAQ: flicker, tiny sprites, palettes, FBX quirks.

One file to share a piece of a project. A group of any graph, a Style, a preset and an Asset pipeline all travel as a kit (.pixorkit), and the file says which it is: Save kit… writes one and Use kit… uses it, wherever they are offered. pxr kit show FILE.pixorkit says what one holds.

Images in this manual are rendered by scripts/docs_images.sh, the settings from the fixture knight and the pictures of the app with the library’s goblin, so they always show what the current version produces.