Hello, I have a complicated question about pixel precision?

I’m not new to Blender, but this is the first time trying this particular technique. I have quiet a few questions, because I’m not sure how to get started.

I would like to render pixelart with Blender, where my use of Blender is to move my pixelart elements around while they maintain pixel perfect precision not in motion, but as unfiltered visuals. In other words, I would like to animate my pixelart and make sure it still looks like pixelart. No antialiasing or smoothing. At the same time, I want the option to do scaling and rotations.

So far I realized, that there are several things that I need to do. I think I have to setup orthographic view for the camera, and texture map the pixelart onto planes. Then the only other thing to do is maintain a z-order for the planes.

My first questions are about this. How can I calculate for example a 720p screen resolution, which is 1280x720 and setup my camera to have this resolution. Very important, because my background images are 1280x720, and don’t forget, it has to map to a 1280x720 screen. So simply selecting the resolution does not synchronize it with the camera.

My next question is about the render engine to use. Should I use Blender Internal or Cycles? I figured since Cycles is a path tracer, it has unnecessary overhead, so I’m almost certain I will want to use Blender Internal, but I wanted your opinion on this first.
Then, if it turns out to be Blender Internal, how can I set it up correctly for rendering pixelart. What I tried so far, is to play around with anti-aliasing, but I could not get a correct configuration. One setting changed another setting, and it turned out to be a real mess. I’m trying to get to a default setup that I can tweak as necessary, but I don’t know where to start.

The next question is about getting the pixel art onto the planes. I will be moving the planes around, but sometimes a single character might have a walk cycle animation. Is there a way, to cycle through a series of frames mapped to a plane. So basically when I move the plane left or right, It plays through the frames of the animation for the walk cycle. This is because, sometimes I will not want to physically animate the 3d planes. I might have a pixelart flag for example blowing in the wind, and the plane will just be placed in a static position playing the frames which were animated in a 2d animation program. One of the most important uses of Blender for me, in this regard is layers for parallax scrolling.

Before I get into any other questions, I’ll wait for you guys to see if you can help with this. I’m sure I will have more questions.

you need to set up your render size with proper dim
then check if the Camera pixels fits the same size then the render size
then it wil give you what you need

for renderer it’s up to you
i like the more realist materials in cycles
and also more powerfull using nodes set up

for anim sorry i’ll let someone else help on that one!

happy bl

Great, I can start being more specific then. So I did the dimension routine. I set the render dimensions to the size of the image. Then I set the camera to orthographic and positioned it over the image.

The render turned out so that many of the pixels were almost perfect, but in random areas over the image, pixels were blurred. I tried fine tuning the camera size but it did not make a difference. Is there a simple mathematical way to make sure that the camera position and size match the dimensions? Otherwise, I can sit there for hours going through every decimal point to get the image size right. This would not be good, when I have many images of different sizes, that are not always on the same scene.

Also, could I be missing a setting somewhere that deals with antialiasing? I tried both Cycles and Blender Internal and I get the same problem.