Lesson 4: Rotation and Re-sizing
You will often find that the sprite you wish to use is not facing the correct direction or is the wrong size. In the Image menu is an option called Flip/Rotate. With this, you can flip the sprites horizontally, vertically (turning them upside down) or rotating them in increments of 90 degrees. Rotating 180 degrees is not the same as doing a vertical flip. It is actually a vertical flip and a horizontal flip at the same time. You can use these rotations to put sprites on their backs. Now, if (for whatever reason) you want your sprite rotated only 45 degrees, then you’ve got a bit of work ahead of you. MS Paint isn’t smart enough to handle such rotations (which is why Photoshop would be the preferred program), but you can fake rotations after a lot of trial and error using Stretch/Skew.
The primary purpose of Stretch/Skew is to make sprites and images bigger, for zoom-ins and the like. To double a sprites size, stretch it vertically and horizontally by 200%. Be wary, however. Most sprites are composed with as few pixels as possible, so they’re at what I call the one-to-one scale: one pixel per “bit.” If you try to stretch a sprite by anything other than a multiple of 100, such as 150, the sprite will get bigger, but only some pixels will be doubled and others won’t, rendering the sprite distorted. You can undo this, of course, but if you accidentally save or do three more actions before you catch on (you can only undo up to three things), then you’ll have to go in and fix it personally. Fortunatly, the doublings always happen in strips all along the sprite vertically and/or horizontally. Just select half of that strip, and all of the rest of the sprite to the left, right, top, or bottom of it, depending, and drag the selected area over one pixel to make the doubled area what it once was. Once you’ve doubled a sprite, you can then use 150% to make the sprite 3x the original size. Pulling that off for other zooms (such as 300) will require a basic understanding of fractions and percents. Be aware that Stretch will only go up to 500% the current size at a time.
Skew is the tool you’ll need to achieve that 45 degree rotation. In Stretch/Skew you can skew a selected image horizontally and vertically by a set number of degrees determined by you. You’ll have to experiment with combinations of horizontal and vertical skewing to achieve what you want, so be prepared to use Ctrl-Z(Undo) with great frequency. If you plan on using that rotation at a later date, right down the final values for the H and V skews so you’ll be able to skip the experimenting the next time. Using skew won’t actually rotate the image, it just makes it look like it was rotated if you do it right.
UPDATE (1/25/07): A reader named Ahmet e-mailed me with a nice alternative for rotating images. What you have to do is paste the sprite to be rotated into a Word document, click on it to open the image toolbar, then click the "rotate left" button. This will spin the image 90 degrees to the left and cause a green dot to appear on the bounding box aroudn the image. By clicking and dragging this dot, you can rotate the image to any angle you want and still have it look clean.