After some time without new releases, I’m back with a big update: Pixelpart now supports 3D!

3D Effects

Great news! You are now able to create 3D effects in Pixelpart and import them into game engines with the provided runtime plugins for Godot (with support for Godot 4 coming soon) and Unity. Of course they can be rendered to images, sprite sheets and videos as well. Here is how 3D effects look like in Pixelpart:

The 3D effects work similarly to 2D effects, but with the addition of a third coordinate for properties like position and size. The new gizmos for translation, rotation, and scaling make it easy to position particle emitters and force fields in your scene, while new emission shapes like spheres, cubes, and cylinders provide even more creative options. To navigate the 3D scene, use WASD while holding the right mouse button.

By the way: If you have an existing 2D effect that you'd like to convert to a 3D effect, simply tick the 3D Effect checkbox in the Edit menu. 

New Workflow

The workflow for creating particle effects has been improved for greater versatility. Instead of having the emitter object define both particle emission and appearance, you can now have a particle emitter be responsible for emitting one or multiple particle types. Previously, having the same emitter emit different types of particles was not possible, but Pixelpart now allows for it. In Pixelpart, an emitter with multiple particle types looks like this:

Don't worry if you have older effects created in previous versions of Pixelpart. They will be automatically converted to the new format when you load them into the new version of Pixelpart.

Other Changes

• There is now a handy timeline below the scene view showing the current time and letting you pause and restart the simulation.
• Editing keyframes for vector data (like position, rotation, size) is now possible in a combined multigraph keyframe editor
• You can assign custom names to nodes in the shader graph now (right-click on node)
• New nodes for the shader graph editor: Value curve, logic nodes
• New shader graph presets
• New effect presets
• New emitter presets
• Improved application icon