Sure, graphics cards have gotten faster since the initial release of Hexels in 2013, but not a thousand times faster. Doing this for every single pixel would have meant drawing the glow image millions of times every frame. Hexels 2.0 had to redraw the glow image hundreds or thousands of times every frame, and this could get fairly slow sometimes. It no longer made sense to draw glow per-hexel, so we decided to move to per-pixel glow. Things like post-effects, layer transforms, and blending modes meant that a hexel’s color, position, or shape could change. Hexels 2.5 changed a lot in terms of how the graphics pipeline in Hexels worked. We were able to get image layers to occlude glow, but it was becoming clear that per-Hexel glow would need to eventually be re-thought. Things like outlines, textures, and image cels had no glow of their own. The glow image could only be affected by the actual colors of the Hexels. Painting with glow patterns like this would yield really neat, stylized pictures. The target-symbol glow is one of my favorites: Target glow in Hexels 2.0 This produced a nice aura, and if you switched out the default glow and put in your own glow shape (called a “kernel”, in image processing terms), you could get some really neat effects. So for every hexagon (or triangle) you drew, the glow image would be repeated a single time: Old-school glow from Hexels 2.0 Hexels 2.0 (and earlier) drew glow per-hexagon. But this convolution is generated in different ways in Hexels 2.0 and 2.5. At the very last step in the render process, the glow image is overlaid onto the main image with additive blending. In Hexels, glow is a convolution of the glow image you select in the Glow tab, and your drawing. So for our purposes, a convolution is basically taking one image and pasting it onto every pixel of another image. Here are a few examples of image-based convolutions: Some examples of image convolution If you’re not familiar with the term, (and I wasn’t, when I started work on Hexels) a convolution is a sort of geometrical multiplication of two things that aren’t numbers. Jump to the How-To Section Glow: The Most Convoluted Thing in Hexels As usual, I’m going to have a background/details section for the curious and a how-to section for the men and women of action. This time around I’m going to talk about glow in Hexels 2.5, how it changed from Hexels 2.0, and how you can go back to something similar to the 2.0 glow if the new glow just isn’t doing it for you.
#Hexels 2 grab and move series#
Welcome back to my series of Hexels tutorials. You could even draw a picture there! (This is a flower and grass and a sun.) Hexels So next time you fire up Hexels, take a new look at that plain-looking empty grid. yellow, black, and chocolate), so all your bases should be covered. Hexels 2.55 even added support for importing Lab color (i.e. aco palettes from Photoshop as well as export back to the format. Gradients can quickly populate an entire grid of colors. Behold! The Hexels palette lets you create gradients in RGB or HSV color space.Ĭreating vertical gradients between the two takes just a few seconds and gives us a nice color selection.
Click the little gear icon at the lower right of the palette and you can select HSV gradients. Hexels will even create multi-color gradients that hit every color it finds along the way. The layout of your palette can help you keep track of what’s what.Īutomatic Gradients Drag and drop a color onto another to create gradients!ĭo you find it somewhat tedious to carefully pick eight evenly spaced colors between salmon and magenta? Then we have the solution for you! Hexels allows you to create gradients right on the color palette by dropping one existing color onto another color in the same row or column. Double-click again to edit the new color swatch. Or you can double-click to add the currently selected color anywhere you want. Colors can be dragged and dropped anywhere on the palette, and even copied if you hold alt. While Hexels can’t tell you where you put your keys or what time dinner is, its palette can help you organize your mind. “Organize your mind, organize your life.” Although it looks deceptively like a plain old list of colors, the color palette in Hexels 2 has got a few tricks up its sleeve.
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