How to get rid of dodder/woobling while animating position/scale/zoom

[Pawel]

I want to understand what are the reasons, that there is such doddering/woobling of either GUI or scene while zooming camera in and out or animating scale of/moving objects and how to get rid of this.

Scaling GUI nodes and GUI text nodes:

Moving and scaling camera over sprites:

[roccosaienz]

Hi there.

I am not an expert and I not sure I understand exactly what you are referring to. But I think that the strange doddering of the image is due to the changing in the number of onscreen-pixels covered by one pixel in the art. It is an approximation problem: I may guess you are using the “nearest” filter to draw the pixel art on the screen, and the onscreen-pixels does not “spring” at the same frame to the next pixel in the art. (I hope I am being clear…)

And indeed I guess slow scale animation is very hard with pixel art.

Anyway, just my idea, I may be wrong.

[Pawel]

Hi! Thanks for your response! Unfortunately, I can’t use linear texture filtering for my pixel art (hero has a custom sprite material):

And yes, I am aware that it is indeed a problem with approximation and I suppose that when I’m animating something it operates on double and it doesn’t fit well with pixel art “quantized” values - but there are pixel art games without such problems - so is there a solution for this? I can’t find it because I can’t identify the problem and name it properly

[roccosaienz]

Yes, you cannot use “linear”.

I think that the problem is, in a sense, unsolvable. Could you please show me a game doing slow scale animation with pixel art? I am really curious.

[gianmichele]

This can probably help:

Smooth Pixelart Scaling

Found this on reddit today and decided to adapt it for Defold. It would be useful for some kind of games where you want pixel art but don’t want the nearest neighbor jitter when scaling on non-powers of 2. One change I had to make was sending the texture size as a constant (I think it would be better to send it as a vertex constant rather than a fragment constant?) as OpenGL ES 2.0 doesn’t have textureSize. So if you use this you’ll need to do this for each atlas. Or if all of your pixel art is…

[Pawel]

@roccosaienz I don’t see such woobling in any pixel art I know, Dead Cells, Death’s Gambit for example have a very fluid background movement, I can’t think of any that has such problems

@gianmichele thanks for the link! I’ll check this

[roccosaienz]

Yes! The Pkeod solution avoid the problem. I have quickly read it, if I understand correctly it first draw offscren with nearest and then onscreen with linear to smooth the scaling.

@Pawel yes, you are right! sorry, probably they are using something similar to Pkeod solution.