Hexels is out!

Update: The servers are working now! We had one rough day before Dreamhost increased our bandwidth. I’ll make a new post soon about all the AMAZING artwork people have been making, but in the meantime you can see some of it on the tumblr I made called Made in Hexels.

The art program called Hexels that Ken and I have been working on for a year and a half is finally out! …and then our site went down, hah hah :|

Below are backup links to the free version of Hexels and the store where you can buy Hexels Pro:

Mac version: http://www.tedmartens.com/Hexels.dmg
PC version: http://www.tedmartens.com/HexelsInstaller.exe
Store to buy Hexel Pro: http://sites.fastspring.com/hexraystudios/product/hexelspro

Trixel Buildings – trixel shape mode in Hexels

Last week I posted about the new trixels shape mode that Ken added to the Hexels beta. Here’s my first trixels piece along with a speed paint video showing how it was drawn. The video is 3 hours of drawing speed up to 12 minutes.

Trixels will be a feature in the pro version of Hexels, which I wrote more details about over on our Hex-Ray website.

Awesome birthday presents from friends!

I got awesome presents from some great friends for my birthday that I wanted to share. Above is a Ted-portrait from Liselore Goedhart (Monobanda) based on my pixel avatar. It’s so cute! I love the fluffy hair and plump Hex-Ray logo in the background. I love Lizzy’s character designs, so it was a nice surprise to get one of myself from her. Thanks again Lizzy! :D

Below is a piece by Natalie Hanke (Coffee Makes Creative) that uses a new Hexels feature made by Ken Kopecky, trixels! I’ve been begging him for the ability to draw both right-side up and up-side down triangles at the same time in Hexels. We decided it would be something to add after release. Hexels hasn’t been programmed with this in mind so it would be a big re-write, however, he surprised me with it on my birthday and got beta testing help from Natalie. Thanks, you two! Click the image to see detail images on Natalie’s website which is full of amazing pieces.

I have great friends :) I’ll post my own art using trixels pretty soon. I’m working on one now that I like, but it’s not quite finished. I’m super excited for this feature, it opens some big doors for Hexels I think!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the Martens family!

 

Trigon Trifexels – Sworcery fan art

I made another piece of #sworcery fan art for the Sworcer A/V Jam! I used Custom Shape mode in Hexels to draw with Trigon Trifexels (haha). This art jam was a ton of fun and packed with great work.

 

Hexels – bevel mode

The fun part about testing an art tool is that I get to draw all day trying to find bugs (best job). Here’s a piece I made tonight in Hexels bevel mode (click the image to see the large full-sized piece). The closed beta testing for Hexels has been going really well, it’s getting more eyes on it and some fresh perspectives.

Zero Suit Samus guest artwork

This is a Zero Suit Samus fan art piece I made for Chris Furniss’ book! Really pumped to be in it along with some fantastic artists like Ashley Davis, Zach Gorman and Maré Odomo. This is my first piece of artwork printed in a book!

Hexels: isometric cube mode

Ken (the other designer of Hexels doing all of the code) added a feature to Hexels that I’ve begged for for weeks! In isometric cube mode, the hexels become cubes and you can use 3 colored light sources to tint the cube’s sides. You can either make the light sources occupy a point in space (local) or they can be directional lights (global). The pink/lavender/light-blue boxes in the above drawing are actually white boxes with directional lights of those colors.

It is done in a Q*bert fashion because the boxes still occupy the original positions of the hexels. This will be an on-going theme for the other features in Hexels that I’ll talk more about later.

George & Jonathan – Beautiful Lifestyle

George & Jonathan just put out another fantastic album. If you like the Toe Jam & Earl games or funky electronic music in general, you’ll dig their tunes. Listen to them here.

I made the fan art in Hexels.

We’ll miss you, Steve.

Yesterday we lost one of the greatest creative minds of our time. We’ll miss you, Steve. Thank you for everything.

– Ted Martens and Ken Kopecky

 

1440 x 900 – made in Hexels