Blurry export when creating Pixel Art

[JMerriman]

Hi,

 

I am a beginner when it comes to using Affinity design. 

When creating a 64x64px pixel art image. i have trouble exporting the image without it becoming blurry. i have looked at similar questions on here and tried to follow previous advise. however, i am not producing any sharp images.

 

Any advise on setting to make this possible would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks 

[R C-R]

I assume you are exporting to a raster only format like JPEG or PNG. If so, the blurriness is caused by anti-aliasing, the process that tries to minimize the stair-stepped edge effect (informally known as "jaggies") when converting resolution-independent vector shapes to pixels for use in raster only file formats.

You can see this clearly in Affinity Designer by switching to the Pixel View Mode (which should be a button on the main toolbar). If you enable Force Pixel Alignment (but not Move by Whole Pixels) while in  Pixel View Mode you can move your vector objects around to see how anti-aliasing will affect your export.

You can (in effect) turn off anti-aliasing on a layer by layer basis for all your vector shape layers by changing the coverage map to something like this:

... but that will result in "jaggies" wherever the vector shape does not have straight, horizontal or vertical edges.