Pixema Studio

Pixema Studio is a professional-grade 2D animation and pixel art tool built in Godot 4, combining the precision of a pixel editor with the fluidity of a traditional animation suite — all in one blazing-fast desktop app.

Key Highlights

Live Post-Processing Shaders Apply stunning real-time shader effects directly on your animation — Retro Film (grain, dust, scribbles, reel scratches, chromatic aberration, Technicolor 2-strip, projector flicker), Wave Distortion, Heat Mirage, Dissolve with burn edges, and Inner Color Transition — all with dozens of tweakable parameters, saved per-project.

Full-Featured Frame-by-Frame Timeline A professional timeline panel with onion skinning (configurable prev/next frame count, color tinting, opacity), per-frame custom durations, frame tags, looping modes, and playback controls up to 120 FPS. Animate as fast as your ideas flow.

Godot Engine Export Pipeline First-class direct export to Godot 4 — generate sprite sheets, AnimatedSprite2D nodes, or SpriteFrames resources with tagged animations and configurable origins/pivots, ready to drop straight into your game project. Also exports GIF (fast C++ parallel encoder), PNG sequences, and sprite sheets.

Aseprite File Support. Open and edit Aseprite projects directly in Pixema.
Pixema supports .ase and .aseprite files, allowing you to work with Aseprite projects while retaining their core project structure.

The Pivot (also called the Root Node Origin) is Pixema's answer to one of the most annoying problems in 2D game development: where is my character's (0, 0)?

How it works:

• Toggle it on via the "Pivot" button in the top toolbar's context bar — a live gizmo immediately appears on the canvas.
• The gizmo renders as a crosshair circle with red (X) and green (Y) dashed axis lines spanning the entire canvas, visually mimicking Godot's 2D coordinate system so you see exactly where root space is.
• Drag the marker anywhere on your canvas to reposition the character's root — for example, at the feet of a character, the base of a building, or the center of a spell effect.
• Double-click the marker to snap/reset it back to a sensible default (canvas center, i.e., the sprite midpoint).
• A floating coordinate badge follows the gizmo showing Root (0,0) [x, y] — the exact pixel coordinates in canvas space — updating live as you drag.
• When active, the handle lights up with a glow effect and grows on hover/drag for precise placement.
• The pivot position is fully saved inside the .pixema project file, so it persists across sessions and is correctly scaled/offset when the canvas is resized.
• Godot export awareness: when exporting to Godot 4, the Root Node2D (0, 0) in the generated .tscn scene aligns with this exact pivot point — no more manual offset corrections in the engine.
  

The Reference Window is a floating, fully resizable image viewer that lives inside your workspace — purpose-built for artists who draw while referencing photos, concept art, or their own animated GIFs.

How it works:

• Open any image (PNG, JPG, WEBP, BMP) or animated GIF — GIFs are decoded by a C++ FastGifDecoder (zero-allocation LZW decompressor) for sub-millisecond loading even on large multi-frame files.
• Animated GIFs auto-play on load, with per-frame timing respected. Controls include Play/Pause, Previous Frame, Next Frame, and a frame number button that opens a jump-to-frame popup listing every frame with its delay time.
• Pan and zoom the image inside the window freely (zoom range: 2% – 6400%), with a Fit button to instantly snap back to "image fills window."
• Flip Horizontal mirrors the reference for the classic "mirror check" drawing technique — a highlighted tint on the button tells you it's active.
• Opacity toggle cycles through 100% → 75% → 50% → 25% → 100%, so you can ghost the reference while drawing without it being distracting.
• The window is draggable (grab the title bar), resizable from any edge or corner (with a smooth bounce tween on release), and can be detached into its own native OS window — perfect for dual-monitor setups. A "Dock" button brings it back into the main app.