Version 1-4 at 7.8.2006

When you tinker around with rendering 2d Sprites for games you may sooner or later stumble across the following problem. When you render with best quality you will get an unsharp border by the Antialias. And so you get a border around your sprite when you set the background colour to transparent, which shows partially background colour. When you render in medium quality, without Antialias, you will get a sharp border. But the result doesn´t look as good as with best render quality.

Some 3D software comes with so called spriterendering. Natively or with a plugin. Then you get best render quality with sharp borders. Unfortunately i don´t have the money for the spriterender plugin of my software at the moment. And so i wrote this little application. It grabs the sharp border of the medium quality picture and places it above the best quality picture. Which results in best render quality pictures with sharp borders. Looks ways better then as you may notice, even in this jpeg shot.

My way is of course more time consuming than using Spriterendering in the first way. You need one complete rendering of the animations in medium and in high quality. May nevertheless be useful for one or another 🙂

My little app isn´t only limited to sprites. It may also be useful for webgraphics where you have the same problem: best quality but sharp border is needed. Pictues up to 1024×1024 should work. Bigger stuff may work, i don´t know. Haven´t testet it. The invisible workspace goes up to around 2500×2500 though 😉

The tool works with Bitmaps only. Implementing the feature of loading and saving for other file formats would have made it much slower …

AASpritesharpborder 1.4, 600 kb , Zipfile — Download

Different from my other games and apps this app comes as a zipfile. Simply extract to desktop. It’s one folder that contains all the stuff.The zipfile also contains the MMF2 source file. Just in case that you want to change something. It is open source.