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Pixx Suite

Enhance · Pixel art QA & cleanup · Intermediate

Pixxoku — Intermediate

Tune Pixxoku to your project: presets and your own synced rules, project palette and colour budget, the Palette tab, animation checks and batch clean-ups.

Open Pixxoku

#What you'll learn

  • How the five presets differ, and how to build your own rule set that follows you to every device.
  • How to set a project palette, colour budget and light direction, and use the Palette tab's ramps.
  • How animation rules decide what counts as jitter, boiling or a bad loop.
  • When to use one-click fixes, safe fixes and hand fixes.
  • How to clean a whole folder of sprites in one go.

#Before you start

  • Read the Pixxoku beginner guide first: opening art, fixing issues and exporting are assumed.
  • Have a few real sprites from your project, ideally a still, an animation and a sprite sheet.
  • To sync your own rules between devices, sign in with your Pixx account.

#How-tos

#How to pick the right preset

  1. Open Preset in the bar above the canvas.
  2. Choose by the art you make:
    • Everything: every rule at normal strength, budget 32 colours.
    • Retro strict: tight 16-colour budget, crisp lines, no partial transparency.
    • Modern: up to 64 colours, softer rules for detailed, hue-shifted art.
    • Game-ready: clean edges, stable animation and engine-friendly canvases (48 colours).
    • Mobile icons: small and high-contrast, checked on both a dark and a light background (24 colours).
  3. Read the score again. A preset changes which rules run, their severity (Error, Warning, Hint) and their Strictness.

#How to save your own rules and use them everywhere

  1. Start from the closest preset.
  2. In the left panel, open each rule you want to change: tick or untick it, set Error / Warning / Hint, move Strictness (1 gentle to 5 strict).
  3. Click Save as my rules…, give it a name (for example My game style) and save.
  4. It appears under My rules in the Preset list. When you're signed in it syncs through your account, so it's there on your other devices too.
  5. To delete it, open the rules panel's list of your rules and use its delete button.

#How to set the project style

  1. Open Project style in the left panel.
  2. Choose a Project palette, or send a palette from Pixxulo or another app (it becomes the project palette). Choose None (no palette check) to turn the check off.
  3. Set Colour budget: the most colours one sprite should use.
  4. Set Light from to where your light comes from. The pillow-shading fix re-shades from that side.
  5. Untick backgrounds your game never uses, so Low contrast with the background only checks the ones that matter.

#How to use the Palette tab

  1. Open the Palette tab on the right.
  2. The top row shows every colour in the art, dark to light, with its pixel count and value.
  3. Ramps (shades of one hue, dark → light) groups colours into ramps. A good ramp shifts hue as it gets lighter; a flat ramp only changes brightness.
  4. Cleaned palette shows the colours left after fixes. Use Use as project palette, Send palette…, or download it as .hex.

#How to check an animation properly

  1. Open a GIF, several frames, or a sprite sheet (Open → Open as a sprite sheet).
  2. The animation rules run once there are two or more frames:
    • Frame jitter: a frame whose position disagrees with both neighbours. A sprite that keeps moving one way is not jitter.
    • Pixel boiling: outline pixels that flicker between frames.
    • Outline colour changes: the outline colour switches between frames.
    • Timing outliers: one frame held much longer or shorter than the rest.
    • Loop seam: the last frame doesn't lead back into the first.
  3. The thumbnails in the strip show each frame's issue count. Click one to jump to it.

#How to choose between fix types

  1. Fix this (F) changes only the pixels named in that one issue.
  2. Fix all (Shift+F) does the same for every issue of that rule.
  3. Apply safe fixes runs every fix that can't change how the art reads: orphan pixels, stray specks, pinholes, doubled corners, outline gaps, pointless dither, near-duplicate colours, muddy value steps, light halos, partial transparency and hidden colour in transparency.
  4. A few rules change the whole image on purpose: re-lighting pillow shading, reducing to the colour budget, snapping to the palette, and padding or cropping the canvas. Check those in Split view before you keep them.
  5. Thin parts, Weak small silhouette, Loop seam and a few others need a human: fix them by hand in Pixxivi.

#How to batch-clean a set of sprites

  1. Pick a preset (or your own rules) and set the project style first. Batch uses them.
  2. Click Batch and select your files.
  3. Tick Apply safe fixes to every file to clean as well as check.
  4. Download Download art (ZIP) for the cleaned images and Download reports (ZIP) for a report per file.

#Workflows

#A shared art standard for a team

  1. Set up the preset and project style that match your game.
  2. Save as my rules…, then use Export rules to save a rules file.
  3. Send the file to your team. Each person uses Import rules, then Save as my rules… so it syncs to their account.
  4. In Flow, add a quality check to the art steps so nothing moves on until it passes.

#Clean art before packing

  1. Draw in Pixxivi and Send to App → Pixxoku.
  2. Fix, apply safe fixes, then Send to App → Pixxula. The art goes in the same form it came in, with its QA grade attached.
  3. Pack it into a sheet in Pixxula.

#Match a whole game to one palette

  1. Make or pick the game's palette in Pixxulo and send it to Pixxoku.
  2. Batch-check every sprite with Off-palette colours on and safe fixes ticked.
  3. Fix the remaining off-palette issues with Fix all: each colour becomes its nearest palette colour.

#Tips and shortcuts

  • N / P step through issues, F fixes, Shift+F fixes all of that kind, I ignores, M shows or hides the markers.
  • Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y undo and redo (60 steps). Ctrl+O opens, Ctrl+S exports.
  • 0 fits the view, + / - zoom, Space plays an animation, Esc clears the selection.
  • Run this rule on a rule's card checks the art against just that rule.
  • The grade comes from the category scores: A at 90 or more, B at 80, C at 65, D at 50, below that E.

#Troubleshooting

  • My rules don't show on another device. Sign in on both devices; your rules sync through your account.
  • "That is not a Pixxoku rules file." The file was edited or comes from another app. Export it again from Pixxoku.
  • Jitter is flagged on a walking sprite. Jitter only fires when a frame disagrees with both neighbours. If the sprite really bobs one frame out of line, that's the issue; if not, check the frames are in the right order.
  • The budget fix changed my colours too much. Undo, raise Colour budget, or reduce colours by hand.
  • An ignored issue came back. Single ignored issues belong to one piece of art. To skip a rule everywhere, use Ignore in this project on the rule.