Texel — pixel art, painted on the model

A Blender add-on for painting pixel art directly onto 3D models, with the pixel grid respected end to end.

Two things go wrong when pixel art meets a mesh, and neither is your drawing. The pixel size drifts across the model — a crate at 32 px/unit beside a wall at 19 px/unit reads as two different games glued together. And shallow diagonals come out as staircases, the L-shaped double-texels pixel artists spend their lives cleaning up. Texel fixes both inside Blender, with no round trip to a 2D editor, then animates the sprites too.

Get it

z3er1n.itch.io/texel — $9.95. Every future update is free to anyone who has ever bought it; the price rises at named milestones ($14.95 at v0.4, $19.95 at v1.0), announced in advance.

Licensed GPL-3.0, and the source ships inside the zip — every Blender add-on that uses bpy has to be GPL. Buying it pays for the work and the updates, not for access to the code.

Built and tested on Windows against Blender 4.2.23, 4.5.9 and 5.2.1 plus the Microsoft Store build. 95 operators, 100% coverage of core/, 16 test suites — one of which invokes every operator in a live GUI and fails if any goes uncalled. Nothing in it is Windows-specific beyond looking for ffmpeg, so it should run on macOS and Linux, but that is untested and not claimed.

Built with AI assistance, including the code and some of the artwork.

Install

1. Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → the ▾ menu → Install from Disk…
2. Pick texel-x.y.z.zip
3. Tick Texel in the list

Blender 4.2 or newer. Nothing else to install — no numpy, no external dependencies, no internet needed except for the optional Lospec palette fetch.

Where it lives

Press N for the sidebar, then the Texel tab. It appears in both the Image Editor and the 3D Viewport.

Painting

New Canvas makes a square image and opens it. Then pick a tool and hit Paint:

Tool	What it does
Pencil	Freehand, one texel per sample
Eraser	Freehand erase back to transparent
Line / Rect / Ellipse	Drag to place. Right-click or Esc cancels
Fill	Flood fill, with tolerance and a contiguous toggle
Pick	Sample a colour off the canvas

Pixel Perfect (on by default) removes the L-shaped corner texels a freehand drag leaves behind, so a shallow diagonal comes out as a clean 1px line instead of a staircase with fat joints. Mirror X / Y paints symmetrically, and Radial repeats each stroke that many times around the canvas centre - set it to 8 and one drag draws a rosette. The two compose: radial 4 with Mirror X is eight-fold.

In the 3D viewport, strokes are raycast onto the mesh and resolved through its UVs, so you paint where you point.

Layers

Add, remove, reorder, toggle visibility, merge down. The canvas is indexed — every pixel is an index into a palette — which is why a palette swap recolours the whole image instantly and exactly, with no colour drift and no float comparison. A 512×512 layer costs 256 KB, not 1 MB.

Palettes

Load .gpl (GIMP/Aseprite/Krita), .hex, or plain hex lists. Save back out as .gpl so your palette opens in Aseprite. Palette from Image lifts the colours out of any image already open in Blender, ranked by frequency. Lospec fetches a palette by its slug — pico-8, endesga-32, whatever is in the URL.

Texel density — the part that matters on a model

Pixel art on 3D breaks when the pixel size drifts between faces: crisp here, mushy there. So:

• Detect Density measures pixels-per-world-unit across the mesh and reports the average, the range, and the spread. A spread above ~1.5× is visible.
• Apply Density scales each face's UVs to hit your target, about the face's own centre.
• Snap UVs to Pixels moves every UV onto the nearest texel corner, which kills half-pixel seams.

Known limits, stated plainly

• The canvas is indexed to 255 colours plus transparent. Opening an existing texture with more than that will fail rather than silently quantise it — a silent quantise is how a texture comes back subtly wrong.
• Animation borrows Blender's timeline rather than adding a second one, so playback, scrubbing and fps use controls you already know. What you do not get is a dope sheet or tweening — every frame is drawn by hand.
• Undo goes through Blender's own stack per operator, not per stroke.

For 2D sprite work

Texel is not only a 3D texture tool:

• Tracks × frames — the cel model. A track is a named row that runs the length of the animation (Body, BG, FX). A cel is one track's drawing on one frame. So a single frame can hold a character and a background at once, and you edit each independently.
• Track order. Tracks stack like layers, bottom first. Add a track with Behind ticked to drop it under the character, or use the arrows in the cel grid to move one. A background added on top would otherwise paint over everything under it.
• Onion skin ghosts the neighbouring frames of the track you are editing at 28%. Only that track: ghosting an opaque backdrop twice over turns the canvas to soup, and you want to see where the character was, not where the wall was.
• Hiding a track is an export. Draw the character and its scenery in one document, then hide the scenery tracks and save — the same file gives you the full frame and a sprite on transparent, with no second copy to keep in sync.
• A layer with no frame is static — it appears on every frame, which is what a fixed backdrop or a traced reference wants.
• Export Sprite Sheet lays every frame out on one image at your chosen column count, ready for an engine.
• Bind to Timeline drives the frames from Blender's own timeline, so play, scrub and fps all work with the controls you already know. Press space.
• Frame timing: hold a drawing for several timeline frames — 2 frames at 12 fps is a sixth of a second.
• Export GIF writes an animated GIF at the scene fps, honouring holds, upscaled nearest-neighbour so texels stay square. Needs ffmpeg.
• Export Sheet + JSON writes the sheet plus a manifest of frame rects and durations in milliseconds, so an engine can play it without guessing.
• Trim to Content crops away empty space, with an optional margin. On an animation it measures every frame, not only the one on screen (fixed in 0.2.5: in 0.2.4, frames that were not shown could lose their art).
• Add Reference loads an image as a faint locked layer underneath to trace over. It is reduced to the palette on the way in.
• Count Colours reports how many colours the art actually uses against a target, because pixel artists work to limits.
• Brush shapes: square, round and diamond. Square is right at 1px; round is what you want above about 3 texels; diamond suits isometric work.
• Dither brush mode (0.2.2): every tool except Pick can paint through a 50%, 25% or 75% mask, or a 4x4 Bayer map at 1-15 sixteenths. The pattern is fixed to the canvas, not the stroke, so overlapping strokes line up; the texels a stroke skips keep what was under them. Also works with Eraser and Fill.

Showcase

For presenting the finished model, in the Showcase sub-panel:

• Build Showcase frames your mesh with a camera, lights it with one of six moods (Golden Hour, Torchlit, Cool Sci-Fi, Hard Noon, Ice Cavern, Clean Studio), adds bounded haze and forces nearest-neighbour filtering so texels stay sharp. Clear Showcase removes all of that and leaves your art alone.
• Render Showcase renders a still or a camera move (Orbit, Push In, Arc). A move is encoded to MP4 when ffmpeg is on your PATH; otherwise you get the PNG frames.
• Not in the free Texel Lite demo.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later, as every add-on built on the Blender Python API must be. See LICENSE.txt. Artwork you make with Texel is yours — the licence covers the add-on only and places no restriction on your textures, commercial use included.

Built by Mintworks · https://mintworks.cc