Technical problem with the gimp?

[troodon]

Is there a way to rotate something in "the Gimp" without having it blur and get distorted?

[wayfarer]

Rotate in 90° degrees, else you'll always have blures.
Or at least 45° with some clean ups and refining it might work. But only 90° are save.

[zookeeper]

One way that might be useful: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 604#191604. You have to be careful with the scalings though, and possibly experiment some times before you find a rotation angle and the right scaling amount to produce a rotated version that isn't overly jagged. I've managed to produce decent rotations with this method, needing only slight clean-up at the end.

Some decent graphics programs actually can rotate without automatically blurring it, but I don't actually remember what the one program that did that was.

[Darth Fool]

The first key to rotating long staff like objects is not to draw it exactly on a horizontal, vertical or 45 degree angle, but rather at about a 30 degree angle. Then with a little reflection magic and 90 degree rotations (and maybe a little cut & paste to correct problems with assymmetrical objects) you can get a whole slew of rotations fairly simply. If the object is massively a-symmetrical, this won't work. If all else fails, I will rotate the object the desired angle, but used the blurred object only as an outline to get the size and overall shape correct. After that you need to edit each pixel.

[Eleazar]

Is there a way to rotate something in "the Gimp" without having it blur and get distorted?

No. Not in any pixel program. Unless the rotation is 90º.

This is fundimental to the nature of pixels. If you rotate or resize, the program has to guess (interpolate) what colors to use for the new pixels, because there's no 1-to-1 correspondence between any pixel before and after rotation/resize. However, some programs let you choose different algorithms to do the guessing. Crude interpolations produces jagged edges. More intellegent interpolation can produce smoother or sharper edges.

So there is always distortion, but the more pixels you are working with the less obvious the distortion will be. With stuff as small as wesnoth units, you can't avoid hand-editing, just minimize it.