Software with Sprite Sheet Export

Aseprite is a pixel art editor built around sprite work: an indexed-color workflow, onion skinning and a timeline for animation, tilemap layers, custom brushes, and export straight to sprite sheets. Extensions and Lua scripts add anything it lacks. It is the editor most Lospec artists reach for first.

Simple Pixel Art Editor is a free pixel art editor that runs in the browser, with no install or account needed. It covers sprite drawing with layers, mirror drawing and selections, frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and frame tags, and exports to PNG, GIF and sprite sheets.

It also includes tools for game assets: a tileset editor that generates Wang-16 and blob-47 auto-tile terrains from a base tile and exports Godot 4 TileSet (.tres) and Tiled (.tsx) files, a tilemap painter with an isometric mode, a palette library and an image-to-pixel-art converter.

It suits beginners and hobbyists making sprites and tilesets for small 2D games. The source code is MIT-licensed.

Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.

The pixel art editor

Gribble is a pixel art and animation editor that runs in the browser (gribble.app) or as an Android or iPhone app. One account syncs projects between all devices.

Website: gribble.app
Android: Play Store
iOS: App Store

Layers with opacity and 15 blend modes. Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, frame tags and playback.

Every stroke is recorded, so a finished artwork can be exported as a timelapse.

The community features includes a global gallery with museum frames, a profile page, followers, likes and achievements.

Tools

Brushes, eraser, bucket, dither gradient, color picker, global color picker, ellipse tool, square tool, line tool, square select, lasso select, magic wand, dither, shading, outline, gradient, symmetry, smudge.

Features

Autosave, cloud-storage, timelapse, image/GIF imports, image/video/GIF/code/spritesheet exports, unique 9-patch mode and export, palette lock, alpha lock, themes, pixel perfect, 512x512 grids, palettes, gribble files (.grbl), artwork forking.

picoCAD 2 lets you make small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and texture them with a single 128x128 texture sheet in a deliberately constrained toolset. Textures can be painted live in the program using a basic pixel art editor.

It also allows you to create simple animations and can be used to make larger and more complex models than the original picoCAD.

You can export renders, models and sprite sheets directly from it.

Pixquare is a pixel art editor for iPad and iPhone with a deliberately dense feature set: layers, animation, palettes, tiled preview and pressure-aware Apple Pencil drawing. It reads and writes the formats desktop editors use, so a drawing started on a tablet finishes anywhere.

Resprite is a pixel art and animation editor for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, built around a touch interface without losing the tools a desktop editor has: pixel-perfect lines, alpha lock, dithering patterns, custom brushes, gradients and symmetry. It imports and exports GIF, sprite sheets, PSD and APNG.

Pixaki is a full pixel art studio for the iPad, built for drawing with the Apple Pencil rather than a mouse. It has layers, a proper animation timeline with onion skinning, palette tools and tiled preview, and exports sprite sheets, GIFs and layered files.

Core Editing & Selection Tools

Drawing Tools: Includes Brush, Eraser, Flood-fill, Gradient, Line, Rectangle, Ellipse, and Pipette.

Pixel-Perfect Algorithm: Applies to drawing tools to ensure single-pixel-wide lines without unwanted extra pixels.

Selection: Supports copying, cutting, moving, pasting, rotating, and flipping selected image sections.

Layers: Supports layer management for organizing artwork elements.

Animation & Reference

Frame-by-Frame Animation: Includes dedicated tools for creating frame-based animations.

Onion Skinning: Displays overlay previews of preceding frames relative to the active frame.

Reference Images: Loads gallery images onto the canvas for comparison while drawing.

Color Palettes

Preset Palettes: Includes built-in palettes based on hardware profiles like Atari 2600, NES, and Game Boy.

Custom & Imported Palettes: Supports custom color palettes as well as importing palettes from Lospec.

Import, Export & Compatibility

File Import: Opens Aseprite project files (.ase, .aseprite) alongside standard raster formats (.png, .jpeg, .gif).

Export & Upscaling: Exports animations and images to formats including MP4 video, standard raster formats, or local storage/social sharing, with upscaling options to prevent interpolation blur on standard displays.

Kenney Shape builds chunky 2.5D icons and sprites by stacking flat shapes and giving them depth, rather than by modelling in 3D. It is a fast way to get a consistent set of game icons, and exports both flat images and models.

PixelOver turns existing artwork, 3D renders and photographs into pixel art, with control over the palette, the dithering and the outline. It can rig and animate what it produces, so a single drawing becomes an animated sprite without pixelling every frame by hand.

rx is a pixel art editor for people who live in a terminal. It is modal in the way vi is - keys are commands, not tools on a palette - and everything is configurable from a text file. It handles layers, animation strips and palettes, and exports sprite sheets.

Juice FX takes a sprite and generates effects such as shaking, flashing, outlines, dissolves and bounces as animated sprite sheets.

A particle editor that renders effects with pixel art constraints: fire, smoke, explosions and magic, exported as animated sprite sheets.

•     3D low poly models (.GLB)
•     Normal maps & roughness maps for said low poly models
•     Voxel models (.VOX)
•     Spritesheets
•     (Doom II, Diablo 2, Advance Wars, RPG Maker, UI Icons, Red Alert 2)
•     Turntable animated spinning .GIF
•     and more.

Drawing tools include Pencil and Eraser with Pixel-Perfect options, palette-step shading, fills, gradients and dithering. The editor also provides selections, raster transformations and a workspace with docked panels or freely arranged floating modules.

Export options include PNG, JPEG, animated GIF, sprite sheets and PNG sequences. Photoshop PSD/PSB and Aseprite ASE/ASEPRITE import and export support subsets of those formats. Editable paths and linked fills are rasterized in external copies, while native projects keep them editable. Tilemaps are not supported.

Pixelithra is a portable Windows x64 application with interfaces in English, French and Japanese. A one-time purchase provides a permanent license with all future updates included.

The free 14-day trial includes all tools, saving and export, and works offline without an account. Purchased licenses work offline after initial itch.io activation.

Students can request a free permanent license for personal or commercial projects, with all tools and future updates included. The license remains valid after their studies.

With a free account, finished pieces can be published to a community gallery, entered in weekly challenges or drawn on together in live rooms. A built-in Academy teaches pixel-art basics in short step-by-step lessons, which makes it a fit for beginners. The interface is available in 10 languages.