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Pixx Suite

Create · Character & avatar builder · Intermediate

Pixxava — Intermediate

Design a full cast: both body bases, styles as starting points, locks and Randomise, palette-matched colours, outlines, a gallery and exports per animation set.

Open Pixxava

#What you'll learn

  • When to use the Hero (Ozzbit Games) body and when to use Pixxava classic.
  • How to use styles, locks and Randomise to design a whole cast of matching characters quickly.
  • How to match a character to your game's palette and pick the right outline.
  • How to choose the right Animations set and scale for each export.
  • How to send characters to the apps that animate, recolour, pack and give them a voice.

#Before you start

  • You should know the basics from the Pixxava beginner guide: the part tabs, Colours, the animation list and Export.
  • You need a Pixx plan that includes Pixxava. To send characters on, sign in and include the receiving apps (for example Pixxara or Pixxula) in your plan.

#How-tos

#How to pick the right body base for your game

  1. Open the Body tab and look at Body base.
  2. Choose Hero (Ozzbit Games) for a side-view platformer: a 32-pixel-tall hero on 128 × 128 frames with 25 hand-timed animations (idle, walk, run, dash, slide, jumps, wall slide and wall jump, ledge hang and climb, a three-hit combo, hurt and death), facing right and left.
  3. Choose Pixxava classic for top-down RPGs, other sizes or body types: 16–64 px characters, male, female or neutral bodies, four proportions, many builds and head shapes, and 21 animations in four directions.
  4. Switch freely: the outfit and colours carry over between bases.

#How to design a cast of matching characters

  1. Start each character from a Style that fits its role (for example Knight for a guard, Mage for a teacher). Styles change only the outfit; body, face, hair and skin stay.
  2. Settle the shared look first: the same Outline setting and a shared palette (see the next how-to).
  3. Use Lock body for Randomise and Lock colours in the Body tab, then press R (or click Randomise) to get variations that still belong together.
  4. On any part tab, Lock for Randomise keeps that slot (for example the guild emblem or a weapon) fixed while everything else changes.
  5. Give each character a name in Character name (used for exported files) and click Save (Ctrl+S) to keep it in the Gallery.

#How to match your game's palette

  1. Under Colours, pick a Palette to limit the swatch choices to that palette.
  2. Click a colour region (for example Coat / cape or Metal), then pick a colour. Pixxava builds a five-shade ramp from it so shading still works.
  3. To bring a palette from Pixxulo, send it to Pixxava or open it from Library: every colour region in use snaps to its nearest colour in that palette.
  4. Random outfit colours (in the Body tab) shuffles only the outfit colours and keeps skin, hair and eye colours. It ignores Lock colours, so undo with the history button if you want the old ones back.

#How to choose an outline

  1. Use Outline in the options bar.
  2. Ink draws a dark outline around the character: the clearest look on busy backgrounds.
  3. Shaded uses each colour's darkest shade for the edge: softer, good for detailed art.
  4. None removes the outline, for very small sprites or when your engine draws its own.

#How to export just the animations you need

  1. Click Export (Ctrl+E) and choose Sheet + JSON (zip).
  2. Under Animations, pick a set:
    • On the Hero body: Hero set — side view (right + left) or Hero set — facing right only (flip it in your engine).
    • On the classic body: RPG — 4 directions (idle, walk, run, attack, cast, shoot, hurt, death), Platformer — side (19 side-view animations) or Everything.
  3. Pick a Scale: 1×, 2×, 3×, 4×, 6× or 8×. Use 1× if your engine scales up with nearest-neighbour filtering.
  4. The note under the preview shows the sheet size and layout (rows × columns). Click Download.

#How to make a GIF or portrait for sharing

  1. In Export, choose GIF, pick a direction and an animation, and a Scale. The GIF keeps each animation's own timing.
  2. Choose Portrait for a head-and-shoulders crop: from the front idle frame on the classic body, from the side idle frame on the Hero. It's exported at least 4× so it reads well in dialogue boxes.

#How to save and reuse characters

  1. Save (Ctrl+S) adds the current character to your Gallery on this device.
  2. Export Recipe to keep a character as a small .pxava.json file: no pixels inside, just the choices, so it opens exactly the same again.
  3. Use Cloud to save your characters (current one, gallery and imported parts) to your account and open them on another device.

#Workflows

#Character to talking portrait

  1. Design the character and Send to App → Pixxara (send Every animation × direction (one sheet) or Standing pose (image)).
  2. Pixxara remembers the character came from Pixxava and shows its credits.
  3. When you change the character later, save it to the Library again; Pixxara's Check for updates finds it and Update from Pixxava re-rigs the portrait in place.

#Character to game-ready sprite sheet

  1. Send Every animation × direction (one sheet) to Pixxula to pack it with your other sprites, or to Pixxeta to add hitboxes (it can box head, torso and legs from the character's rig).
  2. Package the result for your engine in Pixxizi.

#One hero, many colour variants

  1. Finish one character and send This animation or the full sheet to Pixxomo.
  2. Make team colours, enemy variants or seasonal skins there without redrawing.

#Tips and shortcuts

  • Space plays or pauses, 1–9 jump to the first nine animations, R randomises, ← / → step through the parts of the open part tab.
  • Ctrl+S saves to the gallery, Ctrl+E opens Export.
  • Drop a recipe .json, a .pxasset file or a part PNG onto the stage to open it.
  • View S / M / L and Back only change the preview, never the export.
  • Characters on the Hero body include a credit to Ozzbit Games in every export: in the JSON credits and as CREDITS.txt in the zip.

#Troubleshooting

  • If Randomise changed something you wanted to keep, lock it first (Lock for Randomise on its tab, Lock body for Randomise, Lock colours), then randomise again.
  • If a palette makes the character look flat, the palette lacks mid-tones near your colours. Add them in Pixxulo, or pick region colours by hand.
  • If the GIF or portrait faces the wrong way, pick another direction in the GIF options; portraits use the idle frame of the base's main view.
  • If your sheet is the wrong size in your engine, check the Scale you exported and the frame size in the JSON (frameWidth, frameHeight).