Rotate sprite on sprite pixel level, not screen pixel level, in LibGDX

Question

I'm making a pixelated game, and I'm trying to rotate a sprite. However, I'm not achieving the sort of rotating effect I'm aiming for.

Currently, my sprite looks like this when it rotates:

As you can see, it rotates relatively smoothly. You can see that the 'big pixels' rotate smoothly. However, this isn't the rotating effect I'm looking for. Instead, this is how I want it to rotate:

However, preferably in a way that doesn't distort the pixels as much. You can see the difference. I want the actual 'big pixels' to rotate, not the 'screen pixels'.

I think the issue might lie in how I scale the pixels to become bigger. What I'm doing, is that I'm zooming the camera in, moving it closer sorta. What I instead want to do, is to render like normal, then just scale up the screen pixels. That way I'd automatically achieve the rotation effect I want. I don't know how to do that, though.

This is how I currently 'scale up the pixels':

camera = new OrthographicCamera();
camera.setToOrtho(false, 1280 / 4, 720 / 4);

The game's resolution is 1280x720, so the way I make the pixels bigger is that I just zoom in 4x times. However, what I instead want to do, is to render like normal, then just stretch the screen 4x times.

Any help on how I could do this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Have a look at this post. Here is a kind of solution for your problem. Just render first to small frame buffer with nearest neighbor interpolation and then to screen. Perhaps it is not effective way, but definitely the way to achieve such behavior.

Good luck!