Sprite Cropping LibDGX

Question

I've been trying to draw an image of a block with an eye on the screen. I want to be able to animate more than one texture in the same way, so drawing the animations by hand is not an option. The problem is that when I move the eyelid sprite higher up than completely closed, part of the eyelid shows above the expected bounds like this. Obviously, this is a problem as it looks quite unnatural. I'd like to either have an alternative solution to this problem, or be able to crop the eyelid's Sprite object to fit behind the rest of the image. The final image consists of the eyeball, pupil (as I want to be able to animate this too), eyelid, main body and the outlines, drawn in that order. The render function looks like this:

public void render(float delta) {
        float height = this.eyelid.getHeight();
        float eyeHeight = height*0.7f;
        this.eyelid.setY(this.eye.getY()+(eyeHeight*((100-this.lid)/100f)));
        batch.begin();
        this.eye.draw(batch);
        this.pupil.draw(batch);
        this.eyelid.draw(batch);
        this.main.draw(batch);
        this.shade.draw(batch);
        batch.end();
    }

this.lid is the % of how closed the eye is, and the image for the eyelid itself can be found here. How could I solve this problem, or how could I crop the sprite? I don't want to have to reload the texture as a sprite every frame.

Answer 1

I think what you're looking for is the ScissorStack class, which is documented on the libGDX wiki. You can use this object to clip around the eye's frame so that the top of the lid doesn't show.