Choosing a renderer

Crisp pixel art and smooth photos, sorted automatically

Drop a folder of mixed assets into AssetHoard and it works out, at import, which ones want pixel-perfect rendering and which ones want smooth filtering. No tagging, no per-file settings. Open the app and it's right.

How it spots pixel art

When AssetHoard imports an image it looks at three things:

  • Dimensions. Anything 256×256 or smaller is a candidate.
  • Palette. 64 colours or fewer (or 32 or fewer at any size) is a candidate.
  • Format. .aseprite, .ase, and .ico are pixel art by definition, so they get tagged without inspection.

That covers roughly 95% of a real game-dev library with zero effort. A 32×32 sprite with four colours? Pixel art. A 1920×1080 reference photo? Smooth. A 512×512 sprite with 16 colours that's bigger than the dimensions cap? The palette clause catches it.

Setting it yourself

Three places to override, each with a different reach.

Per asset

The asset details panel has a renderer pill near the top. Click it, pick a renderer, done. This is the highest-priority choice and wins everywhere.

Per bundle

Bundles show their file types in the details panel as clickable pills. Set "sprite" to "pixel art" on a bundle and every sprite inside that bundle renders crisp, but only while you're viewing it in that bundle. The same sprite elsewhere falls back to whatever else applies.

Per category

In Manage Categories, each category has a "Renderer overrides" section. Set the Sprites category's "sprite" to pixel art and every sprite in that category renders crisp everywhere, unless something more specific is set.

What wins what

When a sprite is rendered, AssetHoard checks in this order and takes the first match:

  1. Your per-asset override (if you set one)
  2. The bundle you're currently inside (if it has a default for this file type)
  3. The category the asset belongs to (if it has a default)
  4. The auto-detected guess from import
  5. Plain smooth rendering

So if your "Platformer Pack" bundle is set to render sprites as pixel art, but you've manually forced one specific sprite to smooth, that sprite stays smooth. The model is: do the right thing by default, let you veto when you disagree.