This view is split between a 3D viewport and the texture. Hover over faces in the model to see which part of the texture it is using.

Creating Textures

picoCAD does not come with a pixel art editor so you will have to use other software for creating textures. For an overview of quality editors see: Resources: Pixel Art Editors.

When creating textures it's good idea to use picoCAD's palette. Although colors will be adjusted when importing to picoCAD, the adjustment can be inconsistent. The palette can be found on Lospec. Transparent pixels will adjust to black.

Textures can be the size of anywhere from minuscule a 2x2 to the full size of sprite sheet 128x120. Common and practical sizes are 8x8, 16x16 and 32x32 for squares.

Importing Textures

To import a texture switch to the Texture Tab by pressing the button in the top right (hotkey V).

Switch to Textured View Mode by pressing the square at the top middle until it appears checkered (hotkey M)

Simply drag and drop a 128x128 PNG texture onto the program to use it for texturing (this cannot be undone).

(If dragging a texture to picoCAD did not work see FAQ: How to fix textures and models failing to import)

The resolution of picoCAD itself is 128x128, so you can't view all of the texture at once, you can fix this by scrolling down with mouse wheel.

Colors will be adjusted to fit the PICO-8 palette, and the texture will be stored in the project file upon saving. The palette can be found here: https://lospec.com/palette-list/pico-8.

1 out of the 16 colors will be rendered transparent (alpha). The alpha and background color can be set by clicking the two squares on the top bar.

Note that picoCAD needs some of the texture memory for internal use, so only a 128x120 image is actually available for models.

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Editing UVs

Click a face to show it’s UV coordinates on the Texture Tab.

You can now move the entire UV by dragging in the middle, or move individual vertices by dragging on the edge of them (a red circle will appear).

In picoCAD, UVs will move 2 pixels at a time, so make sure your textures accomodate for this, or else your UV might appear 1 pixel off.

To quickly rotate the UVs of a face, hover over it (or select it) and press R.

To use more of the texture than what is shown in the window, scroll it with up and down arrows or the mouse wheel.

Note that you can select multiple vertices by holding X.

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Face Properties

There are five optional properties that can be set on individual faces using the right clicking them and selecting "Face props...", or with the hotkey F.

Properties