FAQ

Why does my sprite flicker?

Pixor removes most flicker for you:

• light bands stay put until a surface has clearly turned (hysteresis);
• a pixel that changes for one or two frames and changes back, while nothing moves there, keeps its colour;
• one-frame inner lines are dropped.

What remains usually comes from very small sprites or very slow motion, where a real sub-pixel movement crosses a pixel edge. Try:

• a larger size, or fewer frames per second for slow clips;
• fewer light bands (Colours > Light bands);
• hand-picked frames (choose the Sprites node in the Asset step and click the key strip of the Timeline behind the asset graph) instead of a fixed rate.

pxr render --debug DIR on a sheet writes a strip per row that marks every pixel which flipped and flipped back.

My sword disappears at small sizes

Thin parts are protected: a part thinner than a pixel is still drawn as a 1-pixel line where it is the most visible. If a part is hidden behind the body from some side, it is hidden in the sprite too. That is correct, not a bug.

The sprite is tiny inside its canvas

The canvas fits every frame of every exported clip from every side. A wide attack swing makes the whole sheet wider. Export that clip in its own project, or use a fixed pixels-per-metre (Camera > Size: Pixels per metre) to keep the scale the same across projects.

How do I use my own palette?

Colours > Palette file… accepts Lospec .hex and GIMP .gpl palettes, or a .png (its own colours, or up to sixteen of its most representative ones). Pixor snaps its ramps to your colours. With tiny palettes (4 colours), presets like retro4 match by lightness only. pxr render --palette also takes a built-in one: pixor-16, pixor-8, dusk-12, forest-12, desert-12, ice-10 or mono-8.

Why is my FBX in the wrong pose?

Pixor shows the skinned mesh’s bind pose when no clip is selected. Many FBX files store an animation frame as the default pose; Pixor ignores that and uses the bind pose. Pick a clip to see it animate.

Do two computers give the same pixels?

Almost always. Pixor’s tests render the same sprites on NVIDIA and Intel GPUs, on Linux and Windows, and in the browser, and compare them pixel for pixel. The one exception found so far is a single pixel in one frame of a walk, where two parts of the model cross exactly at a sample point and the two GPUs round differently. Software rasterizers (virtual machines, some CI services) can differ in a few edge pixels.

The web demo says my browser has neither WebGPU nor WebGL2

Pixor’s window is drawn by the GPU, so a browser with neither cannot show it. The page then shows the model turning on a plain canvas, drawn by Pixor’s own rasterizer on the CPU — the very pixels the desktop app and pxr render --backend cpu make — so you can still see what Pixor does. Any recent Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari has WebGL2; turning hardware acceleration back on in the browser’s settings is usually all it takes.

Can I lose changes by closing Pixor?

Not without being asked. Closing the window, Quit (Ctrl+Q), New project, Open project… or opening another file with changes not saved asks Save changes to NAME? — Save, Don’t save or Cancel. While you work, Pixor also keeps an autosave of the changes every minute; if it closes unexpectedly, opening the project again offers them back (Recover). Don’t save throws that autosave away too.

Does Pixor send anything over the network?

No. It never connects to anything. Crash reports are written to your settings folder, and you decide whether to share them. Browse free models opens the library website in your own browser; the app itself downloads nothing.

Where do I get models?

Help > Browse free models (also on the first-run screen) opens pixor.art/library in your browser: free, game-ready models made for Pixor (hearts, coins, chests, trees, houses and more), under CC0, so you can use them for anything. Open in Pixor on an item downloads a .pixoritem file; open it and Pixor copies the model into your library folder (Documents/Pixor/Library, or pixor-data/library in portable mode) and starts a project with the settings the model suggests. Download .glb gives the same model as a plain file for other tools.

Double-clicking a .pixor file doesn’t open Pixor

Pixor ships without an installer, so it asks once, at first start, whether it may open its files: .pixor projects, .pixorblueprint blueprints, .pixoritem models, .pixorkit kits and .pixorlayout workspaces. Choose Help > Open Pixor’s files with Pixor to set it up later. It changes settings for your user account only. If you move Pixor to another folder, it offers to update them. The command line’s own files (.pixoricons and .pixortiles recipes, .pxrg render dumps) are not registered.

A kit opened this way, or dropped on the window, with a project open is used as its kind says: a Style kit becomes a Style, a pipeline kit a pipeline, a group kit a group in its graph.