We’re excited to announce that Pixelmash 2024.3 has been released, and includes multiple user-requested features that will make a huge difference in your day-to-day workflow: area selection tools and animation frame duplication/reordering!

Pixelmash’s new area select tool works on both standard pixel layers and dynamic-resolution layers, letting you drag out selection rectangles or create pixel selections by color. Double click for magic-wand style selection of neighboring pixels of the same color, or right-click to select all document or layer pixels of the same color as the chosen pixel. Changing the color chooser color while an area selection is active lets you quickly tweak document colors.

The animation timeline recently added to Pixelmash has also seen some useful upgrades. Now instead of having to copy and paste individual keyframes when you make a new animation frame, you can simply duplicate an existing frame, including all the keyframes in all layers. And now you can simply drag keyframes to reorder them!

Have feedback? Come chat about it on our Discord (link via https://nevercenter.com/discord )

Pixelmash 2024.2 is out now, including a new feature that lets you easily record your pixel art creation process as a time-lapse video to share! It’s perfect for creating media to promote your work on social media or YouTube. Also in this release are a bunch of handy workflow improvements, including being able to set custom grid line spacing, being able to use up and down keyboard arrow keys to increment/decrement input field values, and more!

New in 2024.2:

• Built-in time-lapse screen recording
  
• Open recent file menu
  
• Pressing up and down on your keyboard will now increment/decrement values in most numerical input fields
  
• Custom grid line spacing setting in View menu
  
• You can now pan in the preview window
  
• Various bug fixes

For this release, we've added a much-requested new feature for Pixelmash: the ability to edit keyboard shortcuts. To get started, go to "Edit > Edit Keyboard Shortcuts..." to open the editor. You can then select any command and press the shortcut you wish to assign. You can also clear shortcuts or reset them to default.

We've also fixed an issue with pasting layer effects, and separated the Paste Layer Effects command into two commands, which will let you specify whether to add the pasted effects to any effects already applied, or to replace them.

We’re excited to announce that Pixelmash 2024.0 has been released with a powerful new Animation Timeline feature, and is ready for you to download now! Check out the release video to see how the new timeline works:

The new Animation Timeline has long been requested by users, and replaces the old hacked-in animation window that has been with Pixelmash from the beginning. This timeline is much more standard and powerful for easily making animated pixel art, letting you see all your layers, frames, keyframes and animation settings in one intuitive panel that lives at the bottom of the interface. It can be hidden and shown from the View menu when you’re not creating animations.

Use the right-click menu on frames and cells to access handy animation features like copying and pasting animation frames or setting and removing keyframes. Combined with Pixelmash’s unique ability to animate with layer transforms and vector tweening, this powerful new timeline makes creating beautiful pixel art animations easier than ever before!

Additionally, we’ve added the ability to export video files with an alpha channel (Mac-only for now), updated some of the tool icons, and fixed some bugs.

Enjoy!

We’re happy to announce the release of Pixelmash 2023.5, which includes a powerful new Ground Shadow layer effect, improvements to the Gradient and Repeat layer effects, and several bug fixes.

The new Ground Shadow effect is a powerful way to get perfect shadows beneath characters and other assets in your pixel art projects. The shadow will automatically update to the width of the pixels in any given frame (with sliders to adjust relative width and height, among other controls), so it moves perfectly with animations. Apply the effect in the master layer of a file, with different character animations in sub-layers, to get an automatic, beautiful, consistent shadow across multiple animations.

Pixelmash’s Gradient layer effect has also been expanded with support for multiple blend modes, in addition to new Blend Amount and Bias sliders. These extra controls bring tons of powerful new ways to use gradients in your pixel art.

Release Notes:

• Added native support for ARM processors on newer Macs, improves speed and responsiveness
  
• Added new Ground Shadow layer effect
  
• Added new options to the Gradient layer effect
  
• Added support for negative Spacing values in the Repeat effect
  
• Several bug fixes

Pixelmash 2023.4 is here!

This release features the new Animate Transform layer effect! This handy effect lets you animate a layer's rotation, scale, and position simply by entering values. For example: if you'd like a wheel to rotate at 20 degrees per second, simply enter 20 in the rotation field. Many of these animations would be time consuming to do via keyframes and are very straightforward with the new tool. You can also set an independent duration and loop type (such as Boomerang for moving back and forth), and since it's a layer effect you can even apply multiple animations to the same layer if you like!

This update adds the much-requested ability to import animations from sprite sheets. It's a very handy way to get animations into Pixelmash, edit existing game animations, and much more. To use it, just choose Import Sprite Sheet from the File menu, choose an image, and enter your import settings. It supports simple horizontal, vertical, or grid-aligned sprite sheets, and also includes more advanced settings such as padding and the ability to only import from a certain area of an image (for when a single sprite sheet contains more than one animation). Give it a shot, and let us know what you think!

We’re pleased to announce that Pixelmash 2023.2 is released and ready for you to download! This release includes the ability to import animated gifs, which is a surprisingly powerful workflow enhancement. Also included in this release is an update to the Remap Colors layer effect - now a single instance of the effect can remap multiple colors. We’ve also added a few other handy workflow enhancements which you can find detailed in the release notes. Check out the release video below:

Animated gif import in Pixelmash 2023.2 allows you to do things like create complex animated scenes in smaller pieces as individual documents, which can then be imported into a larger project via animated gif. Animated gifs also make for easy transport between different software packages. There are also just lots of animated gifs out there that you can import into Pixelmash to study exactly how someone has made a cool pixel art animation.

Enjoy!

We’re excited to announce the release of Pixelmash 2023.1, which includes a powerful new layer effect (Remap Palette) for reassigning some or all of the colors in a layer/document, improved tools for choosing colors for layer effects in general, and lots of fixes for things like SVG import and animation. Check out the release video below:

The new Remap Palette layer effect gives you powerful options for applying a new palette of colors to a layer (or your whole document via the Master layer). Included are several algorithms for how to perform the color mapping based on your needs, like Luminance Order, which will remap the darkest document color to the first color in the effect list, the next darkest to the second, and so on. The improved color list UI (in all layer effects) lets you import color palettes to any layer effect, either from the document palette or from an image/palette file. SVG improvements include bug fixes for color and layer order issues, and using the average color of a gradient for shapes with gradient fills/strokes.