Question Unity pixel art doesn't look right

Hello, I could not find any information of my problem on this forum or others.

My Pixel art doesn't look right, the background should be grass and the sword should have a straight outline, is this a normal issue?

I've tried:
Changing resolutions
Changing settings on the sprite in question, particularily compression and colour settings
Changing zoom on the game and camera settings
Building the game to see if the issue persists outside unity (it does but not as bad)

vs +

 

You are rotating pixel art.

That's the problem.

Generally you can never rotate pixel art by anything except multiples of 90 degrees.

You get the effect you want, you will need to make separate sword graphics for each angle you wish to display.

 

Fine, sure, I get that, doesn't make sense when you take into account that the background is also wrong, It sits on a tilemap. It's not rotated and not manipulated in any other way.

 

Agreed. I didn't even notice. Looking at it now it appears you are stretching it. Don't do that.

Pixel-perfect stuff is incredibly elusively hard to do. Part of this is because everybody has a different idea of what it entails.

At the end of the day you have textures, you import them in some way, you put them on something (such as a SpriteRenderer or even geometry and a MeshRenderer) and you point some kind of Camera at them, a Camera which could have some additional "pixel perfect" script controls on it.

The only way to untangle it is to steadily work up from the basic image data until you reach your desired presentation resolution.

Then go back and figure out what you want when that resolution is now 1.5x as many pixels. There's different answers you will get from every single person and every single game design.

 

How do you reckon it's made in for example Terraria? From what I can gather the swords/weapons are also rotated but still keep a crisp texture.

 

dont use pixel perfect camera if you dont want these artifacts

 

My engineering understanding of pixels and how they work would lead me to think that their artist made every frame of every rotation.

 

@MaxwellTan That's with URP or HDRP. With builtin rendering pipeline the pixel perfect camera works a bit differently.

I assume the author is using pixel perfect camera with builtin rendering pipeline and "Upscale render texture" mode enabled. "Upscale render texture" could easily cause visual defects like that or shimmering for rotating objects or anything that is stretched or scaled.

 

Solution is to do one of the following:
* Not use pixel perfect camera at all
* Disable Upscale render texture option
* Don't rotate sprites and carefully positioning everything aligned with pixel grid to avoid shimmering.