Pribambase

Pribambase is a small tool that connects Aseprite and Blender, to allow painting with instant viewport feedback and all functionality of external editor at the same time. It also adds a few shortcuts like displaying the UV map in Aseprite or setting up a grid-scaled pixelart reference in the viewport.

Currently, the addon has mostly one-way workflow where you paint in Ase and not much in Blender. Better bidirectional workflow is quite a task tell ya what is planned in future versions.

• Reference explains each button and setting.
• Community to show off your work or ask for help.
• Issues tracker for errors, bugs and feature requests.
• Source Code for nёrds.
• Hashtag #pribambase when sharing the work you created.

Although the entire project is distributed free of charge, I highly encourage you to support it financially sooner or later, as if it was on blen***arket or flip***rmals. There's still work left to do, and it'd be pretty great to be able to do it sooner.

Setup

Video version - all thanks to frozenMeatpopsicle

This plugin consists of two parts: for Aseprite and for Blender. Get them from downloads section. Aseprite plugin is the same regardless of the OS.

Prerequisites

Blender recommended version 2.83 or later, preferrably latest. Minimum version is 2.80, but performance and stability are significantly worse. 

Aseprite minimum version 1.2.30 or 1.3-beta7. Trial version won't work

Installing Aseprite plugin

1. Launch Aseprite and drag the file called pribambase-aseprite into the window.
2. Press Install.
3. Restart Aseprite.

After that, a new menu option called Sync should appear in the File menu

Installing Blender plugin

1. In Edit > Preferences > Addons click Install and chose the file called pribambase-blender-{...}.
2. After the addon appears in the list, check the box next to its name to activate it. The app might freeze for several seconds.
3. Save preferences from the "burger" menu.

After that, a new section called Sync will appear in N > Tools tab in viewport, and a new menu called Sprite will appear in the Image/uv editor.

Usage

After the plugins are installed, turn each of them on before drawing in any order:

1. In Blender press Connect on top of the plugin's panel in the viewport.
2. In Aseprite press File > Sync.

Done! With these steps, the link is up and running. Now you can:

• Open any texture used in blendfile normally in Aseprite, and it will be updated in Blender as you paint. This applies to both textures created normally with blender, and textures set up by the plugin.
• Use Image Editor > Sprite menu to load aseprite files as textures, or create new ones.
• Use Sprite > Send UV to show the UV Map in aseprite.

Known Issues

• PNG images don't update when they have  ".." in the path
• Sometimes pribambase fails to notice the change in file location (Save a new sprite os Save As). In that case, use Sprite > Replace in the UV editor to restore it. The ase plugin currently only acts when something undoable happens with the sprite, so it can't sync the new file location until some drawing happens. Also happens if Blender is already closed, or the blend file isn't saved.
• It's better to disable auto-reloading images by Sprytile or other addons. It does not conflict with syncing per se, but it stops blender from saving file backups.
• Undoing/redoing in aseprite after sending UVs makes the  reference layer do odd things