Pribambase

Pribambase is a small tool that connects Aseprite and Blender, to allow painting with instant viewport feedback and all functionality of external editor at the same time. It also adds a few shortcuts like displaying the UV map in Aseprite or setting up a grid-scaled pixelart reference in the viewport.

Currently, the addon has mostly one-way workflow where you paint in Ase and not much in Blender. Better bidirectional workflow ~~is quite a task tell ya what~~ is planned in future versions.

• Download packaged version for your platform.
• How Do I... tutorials and advice.
• Reference explains each button and setting.
• Itchio forum to show off your work or ask for help.
• Issue tracker for bug reports and feature requests. Kindly don't submit non-technical help requests.

Setup

Video version - all thanks to frozenMeatpopsicle

This plugin consists of two parts: for Aseprite and for Blender. Get pre-packaged version for your OS on Itchio. Do not download repo ZIP, it won't just work without extra steps.

Prerequisites

• Blender recommended version 2.83 or later, preferrably latest. Minimum version is 2.80, but performance and stability are significantly worse
• Aseprite minimum version 1.2.30 or 1.3-beta7. Trial version won't work

Installing Aseprite plugin

1. Launch Aseprite and drag the file called pribambase-aseprite into the window.
2. Press Install.
3. Restart Aseprite.

After that, a new menu option called Sync should appear in the File menu

Installing Blender plugin

1. In Edit > Preferences > Addons click Install and chose the file called pribambase-blender-[YOUR OS].
2. After the addon appears in the list, check the box next to its name to activate it. The app might freeze for several seconds.
3. Save preferences from the "burger" menu.

After that, a new section called Sync will appear in N > Tools tab in viewport, and a new menu called Sprite will appear in the Image/uv editor.

Usage

After the plugins are installed, turn each of them on before drawing: nn blender press Connect on top of the plugin's panel in the viewport, in Aseprite press File > Sync . After that you can:

• Open any texture used in blendfile normally in Aseprite, and it will be updated in Blender as you paint. This applies to both textures created normally with blender, and textures set up by the plugin.
• Use Image Editor > Sprite menu to load aseprite files as textures, or create new ones.
• Use Sprite > Send UV to show the UV Map in aseprite.

To see the changes appear on the 3D object, assign a material that uses the new textures to it, and switch the viewport to material preview/rendered. Just like you'd do without the addon. To first timers I recommend MortMort's Zero 2 Hero basic course.

See Reference for all features.

Source

Source for aseprite plugin is the client/ folder. The repo root is the blender plugin. For using source, you'd probably want to symlink them to extension/addon locations.

Third party dependencies aren't stored in the repo. Download them from PyPI to thirdparty folder, or fetch with PIP:

cd to/project/root

## for your platform
pip download -d thirdparty -r requirements.txt

## for different platforms; the platform tags tags go look up on PyPI
pip download -d thirdparty --platform win32 --only-binary=:all: -r requirements.txt

License

In accordance with Blender developers' wishes, the addon is distributed under GPL-3.0 license. See COPYING for full license text. Specific files or libraries might be also available under different terms, see included comment or package licenses.

Acknowledgements

• David Capello did a significant part of the work on interprocessing API for Aseprite
• Async handling is based on Blender Cloud Addon