 |
Features |
|
|
PixelMonkey has been designed to make it easy to work with small sprites and tiles
on today's large-resolution screens. In other paint programs, I constantly find
myself zooming in on images to tweak pixels -- PixelMonkey starts there. Editing
tiles is a breeze, and I've thrown in tools that *I* wanted to make tile
editing easier.
This is a list of PixelMonkey's current features. I want to add a ton of stuff, but what PixelMonkey has right now
got me started. I'll be adding more features for ages, whether anyone buys it or not, because I use this product,
and I ask the artists I work with to give it a try and let me know what would help them do their job easier.
| |
|
Tile Sizes |
|
|
PixelMonkey works with tiles that are 8x8, 16x16, or 32x32 pixels in size, in texture
sheets that are any size. It will save and load PNG, BMP, JPG, and GIF files.
| |
|
Paint Tools |
|
|
Paint Tools: PixelMonkey has eight standard paint tools: a paint brush, a fill
tool, a rectangular selection marquee and a tool to move a floating selection, a stamp
tool, a line tool, a box tool, and an ellipse tool. Lines can have multi-pixel widths,
and the box and ellipse tool will be outlined with multiple pixels. Lines and boxes can
also be filled (using the right mouse color).
tool,
| |
|
Brush Sizes |
|
|
Brush Sizes: The paint brush in PixelMonkey can be applied to a single pixel,
a 3x3 square, or a rounded 5x5 region.
| |
|
Support for 3 Mouse Buttons |
|
|
Support for 3 Mouse Buttons: All three mouse buttons perform the same operation
on the paint canvas, but using different colors. I've got a five-button mouse, but I
don't use #4 and #5 here. Would you use them? Drop me an
email
if you'd like to see that as a feature.
| |
|
Drawing Modes |
|
|
Drawing Modes: The Paint Brush can be used with eleven different drawing modes.
From when you press down the mouse button til when you release it, no pixel will be
affected multiple times. If you want to progressively add a blur effect, for example,
you'll need to click multiple times. I coded this feature this way to make it easier
to control these different drawing modes -- when working with such a small canvas,
I've found control more important than effect.
The standard drawing mode (Normal) replaces pixels with the current mouse color.
Blend will slowly move all pixels in the current brush size towards the mouse color.
Blur uses a simple blur algorithm to pull in a pixel's four neighbors. Colorize
will slowly shift pixels from their current hue to the mouse color's hue, while
Decolorize will desaturate them. (Hmm, maybe I should call that Desaturate.)
Saturate moves pixels into the HSV color model and increases the saturation
component. Onionate blends pixels with the currently selected onion skin layer --
this can be useful for adding an overlay to an image. Brighten and Darken modify
the Value of pixels (again using the HSV color model), and can also selectively
change only certain color channels if you use the right or middle mouse buttons.
Noise adds a small bit of noise to underlying pixels, and again can add colored
noise by using the right or middle mouse buttons. The Gradiant mode will blend
pixels towards a diagonal color gradiant based upon the upper gradiant palette's
current colors.
| |
|
Color Palettes |
|
Color Palettes: PixelMonkey contains twelve color palette regions. Clicking on any
palette with a mouse button will set that color for that mouse button. PixelMonkey contains
such a huge range of color palettes because, when I've been editing the tilesets that I'm
using in my retro games, I want quick access to shades and tints. I've found adding
highlights and shadows is much easier when I don't have to peck through a cumbersome
color picker dialog to get the shade I want. Nine steps are used throughout to provide
consistent color selection. If you want more precise control over highlights and shadows,
the two gradiant palettes are slightly banded to make it easier to pick a specific shade --
and you can always use the recent-colors palette to grab that color you were just using.
- The eight corners of the RGB color cube (white, black, red, green, blue, cyan,
magenta, and yellow) are just below the main paint canvas.
- Nine slices of the RGB color cube are at the bottom of the window.
- Nine shades of the seven major colors at the bottom-left of the canvas.
- There are two...
- ... gradiant color palettes, just above #3.
You can set the two end colors for each
palette by alt-clicking on one side of the strip.
- A set of the fourteen most recently used colors, just above the gradiants.
- Numbers 7, ...
- ... 8, ...
- ... and 9 are three shade-and-tint palettes for three different colors, at
the top-left of the paint canvas. The base color for each of these palettes can be
set by using the button at the top of the palette.
- The color used for the left, ...
- ... middle, ...
- ... and right mouse button are split into 9-step tint-and-shade palettes at the
bottom-right of the paint canvas. The current color for each mouse is shown in a
large block, and the RGB values of that color are shown to the left of that.
| |
|
Tileset Preview |
|
|
Tileset Preview: You can skip to any tile in the current tile set by clicking on the tileset image at
the top left of the window. The editor will always align the image that you edit to
an integer multiple of the current tile size, so you will always be editing just one
tile at a time.
| |
|
Undo |
|
|
Undo: The full version of the application has a 256-step undo function.
Any changes to the current tile can be reverted directly by clicking the "Revert" button
just below the tileset preview image. Changes can also be stored back to the tileset.
(The 'Revert' and 'Store' buttons are provided to allow you to do easy bookmarking of
sets of changes to a tile, without saving the file to disk. The tileset will only be
saved to disk when you choose Save from the File menu.)
| |
|
Grab Icons |
|
|
Grab icons:
| |
|
Tiled Preview |
|
|
Tile Preview:
| |
|
Stamp Tool |
|
|
Stamp Tool:
| |
|
Onion Skin |
|
|
Onion Skin:
| |
|
Clipboard |
|
|
Clipboard:
|
|
|
|
|
