No filtering for pixel art image exports

[That3DGuy]

Hi,
I've been using Designer for a while now, It's a great product which provides a quick turnaround on designs. However I often find myself requiring to create pixel art for 2D game projects which use either TGA or PNG formats with very small resolutions.

The Nearest Neighbour option for filter comes close, but it causes some aliasing on edges, which needs to manually be fixed in a raster editor, which makes things time consuming.

Would it be possible to add an export option with zero filtering to avoid pixel bleed and get crisp pixels?

[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, That3DGuy said:

Would it be possible to add an export option with zero filtering to avoid pixel bleed and get crisp pixels?

I am confused. How could a pixel have anything but a crisp edge?

Are you making (large) drawings and then resizing to a (much) smaller size?

[walt.farrell]

8 hours ago, That3DGuy said:

Would it be possible to add an export option with zero filtering to avoid pixel bleed and get crisp pixels?

I'm not an expert on the kind of art it sounds like you're creating, and in fact I have very little experience with it. But I wonder if part of your problem might have something to do with getting the artwork properly aligned to the pixel grid.

It might be helpful to see a sample .afdesign document and also the file you exported from it.

 

[That3DGuy]

21 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I am confused. How could a pixel have anything but a crisp edge?

Are you making (large) drawings and then resizing to a (much) smaller size?

The resolutions usually sit between 16x16 up to 64x64 on average for characters and objects, 128x128 for world texture atlases. The pixels cause a bleed/aliasing around it which is undesired for pixel art.

20 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not an expert on the kind of art it sounds like you're creating, and in fact I have very little experience with it. But I wonder if part of your problem might have something to do with getting the artwork properly aligned to the pixel grid.

It might be helpful to see a sample .afdesign document and also the file you exported from it.

 

I have all the snapping features and pixel alignment enabled by default. In the test I set the shape size to match exact resolution as integers, removing any ( floating/double ) values, e.g 18x18 instead of 18,2x18,2, which should eliminate any possibility of pixel/color/transparency bleeding.

I'm including a basic afdesign test file, including the output, then comparing it to the png export from a recreation of the image in Krita. I understand both applications are fundementally different since one is vector and the latter raster based. Not sure if it's easy to filter the results to crunch the pixel on output or lower the vector resolution on the shapes itself.

The example files attached is quite small in resolution so some preview applications may display it with blurry edges. Best viewed in a raster application.
 

 Krita Pixel brush output - nearest neighbour

 Designer output - nearest neighbour

 Designer output shown in Krita.

 

OpenGameArt.org has many examples for pixel art. 

basictest.afdesign

[walt.farrell]

Thanks. I think I'm still not sure exactly what you want.

But if you want to eliminate anti-aliasing completely you can do that. Select each layer in your design, then click on the cog icon (Tooltip: Blend Ranges) in the header of the Layers panel between the layer blend mode and the lock icon. You can then turn off anti-aliasing for that layer:

Does that get you what you want?

 

[fde101]

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Select each layer in your design, then click on the cog icon (Tooltip: Blend Ranges) in the header of the Layers panel between the layer blend mode and the lock icon. You can then turn off anti-aliasing for that layer:

Note that you can also leave it set to Inherit for the existing layers, but group them, and set it once on the group - the layers within the group will then "inherit" the setting from the group.

[That3DGuy]

35 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks. I think I'm still not sure exactly what you want.

But if you want to eliminate anti-aliasing completely you can do that. Select each layer in your design, then click on the cog icon (Tooltip: Blend Ranges) in the header of the Layers panel between the layer blend mode and the lock icon. You can then turn off anti-aliasing for that layer:

Does that get you what you want?

 

Thank you so much Mr.Farrell for your help and support! That solved the problem and it looks crisp after the export. I never even bothered to click on that cog icon. I should spend more time learning the software. 

26 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Note that you can also leave it set to Inherit for the existing layers, but group them, and set it once on the group - the layers within the group will then "inherit" the setting from the group.

Thank you fde101 for the tip, this is going to make the process much more streamlined.

So grateful for Serif's Affinity community.

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome. I'm happy that worked for you