Pixelate gives you three ways to control the color palette of your sprite sheet output. You can let Pixelate analyze the rendered frames and generate a palette automatically, supply your own palette texture to enforce a fixed set of colors, or disable palette limiting entirely to get full-color output. Two additional threshold settings let you fine-tune how aggressively Pixelate consolidates similar colors and filters noise.Documentation Index
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Palette modes
Set the Palette Style field on thePixelateCaptureManager to choose your palette mode.
| Mode | PaletteStyle value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Auto | 0 | Analyzes the rendered frame and auto-generates a palette using K-means clustering. |
| Custom | 1 | Uses a palette you supply as a 1-pixel-tall PNG texture. |
| None | 2 | No palette limiting — full color output. |
Auto
In Auto mode, Pixelate samples the rendered frame and runs K-means clustering to derive a representative palette. You control the palette size with Auto Palette Color Count (_paletteColorCount). A higher count preserves more color variation; a lower count produces a more stylized, restricted look.
The number of colors in the auto-generated palette. Minimum value is
1. Higher values preserve more color variation; lower values enforce a more stylized, restricted look.Custom
In Custom mode, you supply your own palette texture. Pixelate maps every pixel in the rendered frame to the nearest color in that texture. Your palette texture must meet the following requirements. Pixelate validates all of these at capture time and logs any errors to the Console.| Setting | Required value |
|---|---|
| Texture shape | 1-pixel-tall PNG (any width) |
| sRGB | Enabled |
| Non-Power-of-2 | None (if the texture width is not a power of two) |
| Read/Write | Enabled |
| Streaming Mipmaps | Disabled |
| Virtual Texture Only | Disabled |
| Mip Maps | Disabled |
| Wrap Mode | Clamp |
| Filter Mode | Point (No Filter) |
| Format | RGBA 32-bit |
Create or export your palette as a PNG
Each pixel in the image represents one palette color. The image must be exactly 1 pixel tall. Width equals the number of colors in your palette.
Import the PNG into Unity
Drag the PNG into the Project window. Do not let Unity resize or compress it.
Configure the texture import settings
Select the palette PNG in the Project window and apply the required import settings listed in the table above. Click Apply.
None
Setting Palette Style to None disables palette limiting entirely. Pixelate writes the full rendered color output without any quantization or mapping. Use this when you want to post-process colors yourself or when your pipeline does not require a restricted palette.Threshold settings
These two settings are available in all palette modes and control how Pixelate handles near-identical colors during palette generation and application.Range:
1–50. Controls how permissive Pixelate is toward color noise when analyzing the rendered frame. Higher values tolerate more variation between similar colors, treating them as acceptable alternatives. Lower values are stricter, filtering out colors that differ only slightly from the dominant palette entry.Range:
1–100. When two colors in the generated palette fall within this perceptual distance of each other, the less-used one is removed and its pixels are remapped to the more common color. Increase this value to merge more similar colors into a smaller final palette; decrease it to preserve finer color distinctions.