Isometric Dino Run artwork made by Pixeljam Games

Koch’s Snowflake Fractal drawn by Trixelcraft

The Untitled by Cellusious

Snowy firewood pile made by Darkbean this winter not long after Hexels was first released.

FZ: Side Z is out! It’s part 2 of the official remix album based on Disasterpeace’s incredible, dynamic soundtrack for FEZ. I’m honored to have drawn the album cover artwork (with Hexels!), inspired by the visually stunning world made by Phil Fish and the dimensional mess-with-your-head programming by Renaud Bédard. Give it a listen – it’s sooo good!

Here’s a hi-res version of the cover. By the way, FEZ is finally out on Steam! If you haven’t already seen the majesty of FEZ, watch the trailer on Polytron’s site.

Peacock Butterfly by Ben Bruce

Zen Garden by Ben Bruce

Glitch by glitglit

Minecraft + Escher Triangle by Trixelcraft

These were all created with Trixel Shape Mode in the Pro version of our grid-based art program called Hexels. Try out the free version, it’s fuuuuun n_n

Ken here.  If you don’t know me, I did all the programming for Hexels.  So if it crashes or something, that’s my fault.  Currently it seems pretty freakin stable tho, and that makes me pretty happy.  That means I can focus on features and functionality rather than stability.  The most commonly requested feature for Hexels (other than rotated Trixels, which are in 1.1) is image import.  In theory, this is super easy to do, but we wanna do it right, with plenty of options and adjustments so you can import images exactly like you want.  However, we also don’t want to limit what people can do with Hexels just because we haven’t fine-tuned a feature yet. Also, I was inspired by this piece:

Zelda pixel art by Nightshadezero http://nightshadezero.tumblr.com/post/47637266139

I really like the idea of using Hexels as sort of a “pixel art remix” tool.  So I decided to put together a standalone tool, called Image2HXL, for importing an image.  It’s very simple, and just maps each pixel to a hexel.  This means that if you use standard hexels mode, your image will be stretched a bit, so we recommend using the custom shape mode (it has a square pixel preset in Hexels 1.1) with the files it generates.  To use Image2HXL, just drop an image onto the Image2HXL program and it’ll create a Hexels file in the same directory as the image.  You can download it for Mac and PC now from the Goodies section of our site.  Check it out and let us know what you think!  And in case it wasn’t clear, image import is definitely coming in a future version of Hexels…possibly the next version!

Thanks for reading…I need to post more often!

Ken

Last week, we released the free 1.1 update for Hexels! Here are some of the new features we added – this one uses Flatten to Canvas to get a selective glow effect.

Made by Aaron Rutledge

Adventure Time and Portal fan artwork made by mdk7

Super Crate Box papercraft instructions made by Johnig. Other SCB monsters can be found on his tumblr.

Clement Attlee animated portrait made by Ben Bruce

These were all made with Trixel Shape Mode in a new art program we made called Hexels Pro.

Version 1.1 is here! Download it here or on the main Hexels page. See the full list of v1.1 release notes here.

90 degree rotated trixels

Pitch adjustment for trixels

Draw something, flatten to canvas, switch shape modes and draw some more!

Starting in the 1.1 update of Hexels Pro and the free version of Hexels, you’ll be able to import an image to the canvas! You can use a background image as a reference, composite hexels or other shapes on top of it. Just click “Choose Image” and adjust the canvas size to make the image fit the canvas and to get the hexels/shapes to the size that you want. Next you can lower the opacity of the draw-layer (called Hexel Opacity above) to see the image while you draw. Setting the opacity to zero is a way to show, draw, and export the glow by itself, too! (works well along side .svg export since that doesn’t export the glow)

I made this this RUNNER 2 fan art piece for my friends over at Gaijin who make awesome games with a hell of a lot of style. Go check em out! For this, I used the features I mentioned plus the “Flatten to Canvas” feature. This new feature let’s you flatten your drawing, so that you can draw on top with a different shape mode or do selective glow. The first shape is a very thin diagonal line I made with the Custom Shape Editor and the glowy shape on top is the Brixel shape preset that I slanted to match the lines’ angle. Below are some short making-of videos for this piece.

Here’s what it looks like with just the lines and also with the glow on but the shapes opacity at zero.

Here are the other 1.1 features getting added to Hexels Pro this Thursday! If you haven’t already, check out the free version of Hexels here.

Daft Punk, my favorite robots, are coming out with a new album soon, so I made this fan art album cover with Hexels Pro (click to enlarge) to celebrate! It uses pitch adjustment - a new feature for trixel shape mode coming in the 1.1 Update April 18th. Pitch let’s you create right-angle trixels that align to a vertical/horizontal grid as well as a slant.

Pitch adjustment skews all of the trixels and canvas (see videos below). You also have the option not to preserve the alignment which gives you an effect like the second video.

These features will be coming to Hexels Pro this Thursday. Try out the free version of Hexels and see if ya like it! And check out the Made in Hexels tumblr to see some of the AMAZING art people are making.

mdk7‘s tribute to ‘Stars’ by M.C. Escher.

Trixel rendition of CYcat’s new Jeremy Scott kicks

CYcat‘s Tribute to David OReilly’s episode of Adventure Time, ‘A Glitch Is A Glitch’.

Little Boxtown – by Kjell Haften

Poster by Natalie Hanke created with Hexels Pro, Illustrator, and Processing.

 Trixel Settlers – some board game love by Justin Chan

 Animated Twin Peaks tribute by Ben Bruce

These were all created with an art tool Ken and I created called Hexels Pro using the trixel shape mode. Try out Hexels for free.