Tools

Looking around

Lights V

Drag a light to move it over the artwork. Clicking a light also selects it, and the inspector's Lights tab is where you adjust its height, brightness and color. The inspector stays on whichever tab you had open.

The rig is a viewing condition, not part of the map. Nothing about your lights is exported, and changing them cannot change the normal map. They exist so you can judge the surface.

Zoom Z

Click to zoom in, Alt-click to zoom out. Ctrl and the scroll wheel does the same thing from any tool, and keeps whatever is under the pointer where it is.

Hand H

Drag to move the artwork around the pane, for when a sprite is larger than the window.

Note that this moves your view, not the artwork. The tool below is the one that moves artwork.

Arranging layers

Move layer M

Drag a layer to position it on the canvas. Clicking picks whichever layer has a pixel under the pointer, topmost first, so you can click through a hole in one sprite to select what is behind it. Arrow keys nudge the selected layer a pixel, with Shift for ten.

On a single-sprite document there is nothing for it to move, which is most documents. See Layers and scenes.

It is also the only tool that changes which layer is selected. A painting tool always paints on the layer already selected, wherever you click — a brush that switched layers under you would be a brush that quietly painted a hint on the wrong object, and the picture would look identical either way.

Selecting and filling

New in 1.9.0. A selection limits where every hint tool paints, the bucket and the gradient paint a whole area of a hint at once, and the eraser takes paint off one hint or all of them.

Select S

Choose a Shape in the options bar: drag a Rectangle or an Ellipse, draw round an area with the Lasso, click each corner of a Polygon, or click with the Wand to select an area the way the paint bucket would fill it. Hold Shift to add to the selection, Alt to take away from it, and both to keep only the overlap.

A polygon closes when you double-click, click its first corner again, or press Enter. Backspace takes back the last corner, Escape drops the polygon, and Shift on a later corner keeps that side to an eighth of a turn.

While there is a selection, every brush, the bucket and the gradient paint only inside it, on any hint. Pixels outside the artwork are still never painted.

The selection commands are under Edit: Select all Ctrl+A, Deselect Ctrl+D, Reselect Ctrl+Shift+D to bring back the last one, and Invert selection Ctrl+Shift+I. A selection is not part of the undo history, which is why Reselect exists. It stays while you change frames or layers of the same size.

To fill the selected area with a hint, choose the hint in the options bar and click Fill, or press Alt+Delete; Clear, or Delete, takes that hint out of it. Both are one step of undo.

Paint bucket K

Click to fill an area with the Hint chosen in the options bar, which starts as the last hint tool you picked. Alt-click empties the area of that hint instead.

By says what an area is. Color takes the pixels like the one you click, within the Tolerance, which suits flat pixel art. Lines takes everything inside the drawn lines around the click, which suits shaded artwork, where no tolerance separates one area from the next but the line between them does. Contiguous keeps the fill to pixels connected to the one you click; turned off, it takes every like pixel in the sprite.

The hint's own settings apply: In front, Behind, Flatten and Direction fill at their Strength, and Direction fills with the direction on its ball.

Gradient Q

Drag across a hint, chosen in the options bar as for the bucket. Shift keeps the drag to an eighth of a turn.

• Fade paint grades the hint already painted, from as it is where you start to nothing where you stop. It is how a part painted In front is made to join the surface behind it gradually, and it cannot paint anything new.
• Fill paints a ramp of the hint, from its strength where you start to nothing where you stop, and like any paint it does not weaken paint that is already stronger.

Linear ramps along the drag; Radial ramps out from where you start. With a selection, the gradient stays inside it.

Eraser E

A brush that takes paint off hints, leaving the artwork alone. Hint in the options bar chooses which: All hints, the default, or any one of them, so you can clean up a Flatten fill without touching the In front painted over it. One drag through several hints is one step of undo.

It has the brush's Size, Hardness and Brush settings, and keeps to a selection like any brush. Any hint tool can also erase its own hint with Alt-drag, the right mouse button, or the eraser end of a pen.

Correcting line detection

The tool finds your line work automatically, by colour. These two are for where it got it wrong.

Add stroke B

Paint over an edge the detection missed, and it will be treated as a drawn line the surface folds along.

Reach for it when a fold you can plainly see in the artwork has no effect on the result. Common causes: the line is drawn in a colour close to what it sits on, or it is soft enough that the detection reads it as shading.

Remove stroke R

Paint over something the detection did find but should ignore.

Reach for it when the result has a crease where the artwork has no fold — most often over painted shading, cross-hatching, or texture detail like scales, where every scale becomes its own little ridge. Painting this over the region flattens it back out.

Its key was E until 1.9.0, when the eraser took it, as an eraser's key everywhere else.

Describing the surface

Cut outline C

Marks part of the outline as an occluding cut — an edge where the shape simply stops — rather than a surface curving away out of sight.

The distinction is invisible in the artwork and matters a great deal to the result. A rounded pauldron curves away at its edge; a flat blade or a cut-off plank does not, and treating its edge as a curve gives it a rolled lip it should not have.

Paint it on the outline itself, not inside the shape. A stroke that touches no outline pixels changes nothing, and the application will tell you so.

Outline edge G

The opposite of Cut outline: marks an edge of the image where the art stops, when the tool would otherwise read it as carrying on.

Art that runs off the canvas is normally assumed to be cut off by the frame rather than curving away, so the canvas border is never treated as an outline. With a tile grid, every tile's edge is treated the same way, which is right for fill that continues into the next tile and wrong for the top of a platform, where the grass really does stop against the sky. Paint this along those edges and they roll away like any other outline.

Paint it on the edge pixels themselves. Anywhere else it has nothing to act on, and the application will tell you so. With a tile grid on, a stroke stays in the tile where it started, so a wide brush along a tile line marks only the tile you meant. A wide brush is fine in the corners too: an edge opens only where the paint runs along it further than it reaches in, so a stroke along the top that also covers the first few pixels of each side opens the top alone.

Flatten F

Holds a region facing the camera. For flat plates, panels, shield faces, signage — anything that should read as flat rather than domed.

Filled rather than drawn along, and there is a general Flatten interior slider in the inspector that does the same thing to the whole sprite. Painting a region takes precedence over the slider: a global setting fighting a painted one is how a hint ends up looking as though it did nothing, so the painted answer wins and the panel says so.

Tube axis A

Draw a stroke down the length of a limb and it is read as a cylinder instead of a dome.

Without this, a long thin shape solved from its silhouette tends to round off along its length as well as across it, so an arm looks like a sausage with domed ends rather than a tube. The stroke tells the tool which direction is along the shape.

Its influence extends outward from your stroke as far as Tube axis reach in the inspector, which needs to be at least about half the limb's width to reach the outline on both sides. Too small and the hint does nothing; the application will tell you when the axis never reaches the outline.

In front D

Fill the part of the artwork that overlaps another part — an arm across a body, a tail crossing a leg, a scarf over a chest.

This is the one hint that describes a relationship rather than a feature, and it fixes a problem no silhouette can settle. Where two parts overlap, the shared edge looks exactly like a fold in one continuous surface, so the surface behind tilts to follow it, and light that should be blocked spills onto it instead. Marking the nearer part means its edge stops folding what is behind it, and the surface behind carries on underneath.

Line work within a short distance of the front edge is absorbed into it, so you do not have to erase the arm's own outline separately.

The surface behind carries on underneath as one surface. A strap or a limb across a body does not split the body into a piece either side, in the normal map or the height map, so you can paint thin straps and ribbons that cross a figure without moving them to a layer of their own. New in 1.5.0.

How strongly you paint is how far in front. Use Strength in the options bar to paint a part that is only partly in front, or fades toward where it joins what it crosses: its edge turns less the lower it is painted, and the surface behind is never affected. See Part of the way in front.

Behind U

Fill a part that sits behind another: the far arm behind a body, the back leg of a horse, a cape behind the figure wearing it. It is the opposite of In front, and says the same thing from the other side: the part you fill is further away than what is around it, so the body's edge turns away where it crosses the part, and the part carries on under the body.

Use both and one sprite has three depths: the part filled Behind, the unpainted body, and the part filled In front. A character with a far arm behind the body and a near arm across it needs no layers. Each part is solved as it would be with the other hint unpainted, so the body still carries on under the near arm, and the far arm still carries on under the body. The height map has the same three depths: a part filled Behind sinks below the body by as much as a part filled In front is lifted above it.

How strongly you paint is how far behind, as with In front. Lower Strength, or fade it with the Gradient, where the far part joins the body. Behind must leave something in front of it: filled over the whole shape, it changes nothing, and the application says so. New in 1.10.0.

Convex area O

Fill a shape that domes toward you inside a busier surface — a glassy eye, a rivet, the boss of a shield.

The shape's own edge becomes the rim of a surface of its own. Fold angle sets how steep that rim is, facing you in the middle, and creased off from whatever it sits in so the dome does not spread outwards. Outline blur rounds a jagged painted edge before the rim is taken. Nothing about such a shape reaches the sprite's outline, so without this the silhouette says nothing about it and the marks drawn around it read as a fold.

Erase the shape's outline with Remove stroke R first, otherwise the stroke and the rim describe the same edge and the stroke's version is a fold.

Concave area I

The same, dished away from you instead of toward you: a crater, a dent, an eye socket. It is Convex area with the direction reversed. Fold angle and Outline blur apply the same way.

Opening W

Fill the mouth of something hollow seen from above: a well, a barrel, a bucket, a chimney, a pit.

Inside, it is the far wall you see, facing back across the hole and tipped toward you by Camera pitch, the same at every depth. So the hole goes on down behind the near rim instead of having a floor, which is the difference from Concave area: a dish turns back up toward you at its near edge. Each separate fill is one mouth, measured across its widest row.

A Flat face painted around the mouth does not claim it, though a face otherwise takes in everything it encloses. The line around the mouth is not read as a fold; lines further inside are. New in 1.8.0.

Direction N

Paint a direction straight on, for the patch the other hints cannot fix: a bump the solve rounded the wrong way, a corner that should catch the light and does not.

Choose the direction on the ball in the options bar. The ball is colored as a normal map colors a sphere, so you point at the part of it that faces where you want: the middle faces you, the edge faces away. Or Ctrl+click the picture to pick up a direction that is already there, which is the quick way to match a neighbor. Strength is how firmly the direction is held; paint lower to ease it into the surface around it.

The rest of the surface is still solved, so a painted patch blends into what is around it rather than sitting on top of it. Painted over the sprite's outline, it frees those pixels from turning edge-on, so you can override a hard top edge or a flat base too.

The layer is a normal map with alpha. Export it with File ▸ Export hint layers…, paint it with a normal-map brush in Photoshop or Aseprite, and a layer named direction comes back in as it was painted. New in 1.9.0.

Flat face P

Fill a face that points somewhere other than at you — a wall, a roof, the side of a crate, the flank of a building.

Flatten holds a surface facing the camera. This is for the other case, a surface that is genuinely flat but turned away, which the silhouette cannot help with: a wall and a gentle bulge can have exactly the same outline, so the solver rounds it.

You never state which way the face points. The direction is measured from the edges you already drew — a wall's horizontal edges run off towards its vanishing point, and that slope is the turn. So the hint needs no angle from you, and two walls meeting at a corner come out consistent with each other because they were measured from the same drawing.

One fill can cover several faces. The drawing splits it: the lines between faces are not part of any of them, so filling a whole building in one pass gives you its separate walls and roof rather than one averaged plane. This depends on the line work being unbroken — a gap in an outline is how two faces end up read as one.

The one thing the drawing cannot tell you is how far the camera looks down, because a shallow pitch and a slight turn project identically. That is Camera pitch in the solver settings, and it is one control for the whole sprite rather than a decision per face.

Not the object X

Fill something that was drawn into the sprite but is not part of it — a baked contact shadow under the feet, a glow bleeding off a lamp, a patch of ground left attached to a prop, a matte behind a portrait.

These are opaque pixels, so the outline runs around them, and the outline is the one thing this tool treats as fact. A shadow pooled at a character's feet is therefore read as more character, inflated into a shape, and lit as though it were a slab of geometry lying on the floor. It is one of the most common reasons a sprite that looks fine comes out wrong.

No other hint can say this. Remove stroke argues about what counts as a drawn line, Cut outline about how the outline behaves where it already is, Flatten is a preference the solver can outvote — all three concern a pixel that is still part of the shape. This one takes the pixel out of the shape.

The excluded area exports flat, not as a hole. Your sprite's own transparency is untouched and the artwork still shows the shadow; the normal map simply stops claiming there is a form there, so it lights like flat ground. That is almost always what you want, since a baked shadow is a mark on the floor.

Two cautions. Excluding a region in the middle of a sprite leaves a hole with an edge of its own, and the surface will curve away into it just as it does at the silhouette — right for a shadow attached to the bottom edge, wrong as a way of deleting line work, which is what Remove stroke is for. And it is the one hint that can lose you something: it removes artwork from the solve, so paint it over the shadow rather than generously around it.

Trust methods T

Fill a region where the detail methods should be allowed to speak. See Solver settings for what those are.

The methods are alternative ways of guessing a surface — following the artwork's shading, or adding a bevelled edge — and they are switched off by default because turning them on across a whole sprite tends to spoil the parts that were already right. This tool is how you aim them: paint the region that nothing else describes well, set a weight, and the methods act there and nowhere else.

With a weight set and nothing painted, the methods apply to the whole sprite, and the inspector says so plainly. That is a usable mode, not a mistake, but it is rarely the one you want.