Pixel Art Shader: from 3d to Retro Pixel Art

Japanese artist Toshihiro Kushizaki has released the Pixel Art Shader: a free Blender shader that should convert any 3D model into old-school pixel art.

To render out a pixel art image, you just need a 3D model in .x format and a palette texture, which defines the set of colours to be used; but you can augment the result with standard texture maps, even including AO.

The image is generated in BMP format, and the results look pretty good, at least in the demo scene.

There’s a detailed online manual, but like the rest of Kushizaki’s site, it’s in Japanese, so if you’re a non-Japanese-speaker, you’ll need to navigate Google Translate.

Download the Pixel Art Shader on Toshihiro Kushizaki’s website (Automatic English translation)

Read an English-language user-contributed tutorial on using the shader

That actually looks really cool, he's certainly nailed the way outlines should work. Wonder if it can be ported to other systems.

You can model in any application, then import into Blender, and colour the model. The crucial part is the exporter: it exports a x file that is compatible with the stand-alone pixel shader converter.

Here is a link to the shader.

http://kushi.lv9.org/pixelartshader/Pix ... v1.0.0.zip

This looks very nice.

Edit:

Cant even get the program to run. It pops open, and then closes again.

Here is a link to the shader.

http://kushi.lv9.org/pixelartshader/Pix ... v1.0.0.zip

This looks very nice.

Edit:

Cant even get the program to run. It pops open, and then closes again.

That is exactly what happens if you click on the executable without feeding it a x file. Follow the instructions in the English tutorial I linked to in the first post.