Pixxura — getting started and how-tos

#What Pixxura is for

Pixxura adds real lighting and effects to pixel art without making it blurry. You place lights around a sprite (a torch, a moon, a neon sign), Pixxura works out how light falls across its shape, and you stack effects such as glow, outlines, palette cycling or an old-TV CRT look on top. When you like it, you bake the result into a PNG, a sprite sheet or a GIF that drops straight into your game.

It is made for game artists who want mood (a dungeon lit by torches, a crystal glowing at night) while keeping every pixel crisp.

#Your first lit sprite in 5 minutes

1. Open Pixxura. A sample crystal cluster is already loaded and lit, so you can start playing right away.
2. Drag a light (the small circle on the canvas) around the sprite and watch the shading follow it.
3. Click Presets in the top bar and pick Neon. The lights and effects are replaced in one click; your sprite stays the same.
4. Use Before, Split and After in the options bar to compare the original with the lit version.
5. Click Export, choose GIF (the flicker animates), pick a scale such as 4× and click Download.

#How-tos

#How to open your own sprite

1. Click Open in the top bar and choose a PNG, JPEG, WebP, animated GIF or APNG (up to 480×480 pixels). You can also drag a file onto the canvas or paste one with Ctrl+V.
2. Animated files keep their frames: each frame is lit separately.
3. Your lights and effects stay in place when you swap sprites, so you can light a whole set the same way.

#How to add and adjust lights

1. In the Lights panel on the left, click + Point, + Spot or + Sun (directional).
2. Click a light in the list (or on the canvas) to select it, then drag it on the canvas to move it.
3. Under Selected light, change its colour with the swatch and tune Intensity, Radius, Falloff, Height (z) and Halo (the glow in the air around it).
4. Spot lights add an angle and a cone width; a sun lights everything from one direction.
5. Remove a light with the × next to its name.

#How to make a light flicker or pulse

1. Select the light.
2. Next to Animate, choose Flicker (a torch or candle) or Pulse (a slow magic glow). Steady turns it off.
3. Set Amount for how strong the effect is.
4. The animation loops automatically. To change how long the loop is, open the Canvas panel and set Loop frames and FPS.

#How to keep the pixel-art look

The Lighting panel has the settings that stop light from looking smooth and painterly:

• Toon bands cuts the light into a few clear steps instead of a smooth gradient.
• Snap → Steps limits the number of brightness levels; Sprite palette keeps only colours that already exist in your sprite.
• Ambient sets how bright the unlit side is, and its colour swatch tints the shadows (for example, a cool blue for night).
• Specular and Shininess add bright highlights; Self-shadows lets raised parts cast small shadows across the sprite.

#How to use a preset

1. Click Presets in the top bar.
2. Pick one of the eight looks: Torch-lit, Moonlight, Neon, Haunted, Retro TV, Underwater, Heat haze or Golden hour. Each thumbnail shows your own sprite with that look.
3. A preset replaces the lights and the effect stack, so use it as a starting point and then fine-tune.

#How to add effects

1. In the Effect stack panel on the right, click any + button under Add an effect: Pixel glow, Outline, Drop shadow, Colour adjust, Posterize, Hue shift, Palette map, Palette cycling, Dither fade, Wave, Heat haze, Ripple, Chromatic aberration, Pixelate or CRT.
2. Effects run from top to bottom, each working on the result of the ones above it. Use the arrows to reorder them.
3. Untick an effect to switch it off without losing its settings, or remove it with ×.
4. Click an effect's name to show its settings, such as glow strength or CRT scanlines.

#How to check the normal map

Pixxura works out the shape of your sprite automatically so light can wrap around it.

1. In the options bar, switch View to Normals to see the shape map, or Light mask to see only the light.
2. In the Normal map panel, choose Generate, then a method: Pillow (rounded), Pillow + detail, Bevel (flat top with sloped edges) or Brightness.
3. Adjust Strength, Edge depth and Smooth until the light reads the way you want.
4. If you painted your own normal map, click Import normal map… (it must be the same size as the sprite).

#Exporting and sharing

Click Export in the top bar to open Bake & export. Choose a format:

Pick a Scale from 1× to 8× (pixels are enlarged cleanly), then click Download.

Send to App passes the lit result to another Pixx app as an animation, a single image or a palette. Library opens an image, frames or a sheet from your Pixx library as the sprite, or a palette to snap the light to.

#Tips and shortcuts

• Ctrl+Z undoes and Ctrl+Y redoes changes.
• Scroll to zoom and drag to pan; on a tablet, pinch to zoom.
• The GPU preview badge shows whether your device's graphics chip is drawing the live preview. Exports always use the same exact method, so they look identical on every device.
• Give the sprite some Padding (in the Canvas panel) if a glow, outline or wave gets cut off at the edges.
• Your work is saved on this device automatically. Sign in and use Cloud to open it on another device.

#Troubleshooting

• If the light looks flat, check that Lighting on is switched on in the options bar and raise the normal map Strength.
• If colours look muddy, try Snap → Sprite palette so only your sprite's own colours are used.
• If a glow is clipped at the edge, increase Padding in the Canvas panel.
• If the GIF has hard-edged glows, export APNG instead; GIF can't store soft transparency.

#Related guides

• Send to App
• Pixxivi for drawing the sprite you light
• Pixxula for packing sheets
• Plans and billing