What is Kenshape? Take 2D pixel art and turn into 3D Voxel art for game object creation for Unity.

Kenshape is a great and very inexpensive 3D Voxel art tool! In this tutorial I'll go through all of the top features of the Kenshape tool from the prodigious Kenney.nl Also check out How to Make a Bounce Game Series https://bit.ly/39HIYBU. Contents: 0:00 Intro 0:15 What is Kenshape https://tools.

This tutorial introduces Kenshape, a low-cost voxel tool from Kenney that turns 2D pixel drawings into 3D game objects by assigning depth to each pixel. It covers the interface, importing custom palettes, drawing and extruding a building, and exporting clean FBX and texture files into Unity. At about 3.99, it is an easy pickup for fast 3D props.

Get oriented in Kenshape

Kenshape is available on itch.io and the Epic Game Store, and although it is Windows-native it runs on Mac via a documented workaround. Start a new 32x32 document. The left side offers shaped brushes (square, triangle) that rotate when you hold Shift; across the top are pencil, line, and fill tools plus mirroring options for vertical and horizontal symmetry. Right-click erases.

Import a custom palette

The palette is limited to 16 colors but you can import your own. Using Kenney's linked resource at lospec.com, find a 16-color palette, download it as PNG (1x), save it, then click the palette icon in Kenshape and open the file to swap in your colors. This lets you match artwork to a specific project style.

Draw and extrude a building

With horizontal mirroring on, sketch a storefront, fill it, and add windows and doors. Then switch from drawing mode to depth mode, where each pixel shows a depth from 1 to 8. Paint depth values, for example 8 across the top, 7 for the main face, and 6 for inset windows, to push and pull the surface. Switch to model view to preview the 3D result, and use the depth scale slider to make the whole object deeper or chunkier.

Export into Unity

Export as FBX for Unity, choosing either an atlas texture (a color per face) or unwrapped UVs (which let you paint the texture and have it rewrap automatically); unwrapped is the preferred default. Optimization is on by default. Save the FBX and its PNG together into the same Unity folder and drag the model in. Because the exported PNG is tiny (128x128), open it in Photoshop and resize to 1024x1024 using nearest-neighbor resampling to keep it crisp, then it imports clean. Kenshape is a quick, cheap way to make voxel props for Unity.