Subscribe to download
3D Pixel Art Editor

Go to Entities / Jakub Baku / 3D Pixel Art and spawn it. Press "E" (or any +use key), the Pixel art editor should pop up. You can draw on the canvas with left mouse button and erase with right mouse button. In the color mode the color's alpha controls the mixing of a color. Press Toggle Heightmap View to edit the height map. In this mode you paint a height value (color's alpha) with left mouse button and erase (set to 0) with right mouse button.

To save a pixel art type in a name in the text box and press "Save Image as". To load an image, type in the name of the image and press "Load Image". I've included two images with the addon by default: pixelpick and pixelabstract3, which you can load up and test / edit.

To apply the result click "Update".

I know the editor is a little bit clunky so there's an option of importing the images from, let's say, GIMP or any other editor.

Click C - > Edit Properties.. to change the PWidth (Pixelmap width), PHeight (Pixelmap height), PScale (scale of the rendered pixelart) or HeightMapScale (how high is the heightmap).

MAKE SURE TO "UPDATE" THE PIXEL ART after changing the scale, otherwise the render bounds will be messed up.

The pixel arts are stored as TARGA images, so you can make a custom pixel art with GIMP or any other image editing software and import it into the game!

Requirements:

• The image's width or height must NOT be bigger than 100px. Otherwise it won't import.
  
• The image must be in a TARGA format.
  
• Must be a true color image (non indexed / colormapped)
  
• Must be in top-left orientation and must NOT be RLE compressed.

After exporting as <name>.tga please change the extension to .txt, so it will be <name>.txt, and put the file in a garrysmod/data folder. Now just go into the Pixel art editor, type in <name> into the text box and click "Load Image". Update the pixel art and you should now see it in game :)

Alpha channel of an image is treated as a heightmap and visibility map:
alpha 0 - pixel invisible
alpha 1 - pixel visible, height 1
alpha x > 0 - pixel visible, height x

I recommend importing images WITHOUT an alpha channel thus no height map, and adding any height info in the pixel art editor in game, however if you want to do that in gimp just right click the layer -> Add Layer Mask and then Fill the entire area with r = 1, g = 1, b = 1 (010101 in HTML notation) and finaly paint the height info over that or even simpler: paint the height map or copy-paste it and then Colors -> Levels -> Output Levels 1 - 255.

- My TGA does not import
- Make sure your targa's origin is top-left and it's not RLE compressed

- My pixel art is not fully-rendered
- 100x100 images tend to break the Mesh rendering system because of the overload. Try to keep
your image within 50x50.

- My pixel art does not show in the world, only in editor.
- Press "Update"