Tiling rectangles seamlessly in WPF

Posted by Joe White on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Joe White
Published on 2009-06-07T13:17:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/07 7:03 UTC
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I want to seamlessly tile a bunch of different-colored Rectangles in WPF. That is, I want to put a bunch of rectangles edge-to-edge, and not have gaps between them.

If everything is aligned to pixels, this works fine. But I also want to support arbitrary zoom, and ideally, I don't want to use SnapsToDevicePixels (because it would compromise quality when the image is zoomed way out). But that means my Rectangles sometimes render with gaps. For example:

<Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
      xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
      Background="Black">
  <Canvas SnapsToDevicePixels="False">
    <Canvas.RenderTransform>
      <ScaleTransform ScaleX="0.5" ScaleY="0.5"/>
    </Canvas.RenderTransform>
    <Rectangle Canvas.Left="25" Width="100" Height="100" Fill="#CFC"/>
    <Rectangle Canvas.Left="125" Width="100" Height="100" Fill="#CCF"/>
  </Canvas>
</Page>

If the ScaleTransform's ScaleX is 1, then the Rectangles fit together seamlessly. When it's 0.5, there's a dark gray streak between them. I understand why -- the combined semi-transparent edge pixels don't combine to be 100% opaque. But I would like a way to fix it.

I could always just make the Rectangles overlap, but I won't always know in advance what patterns they'll be in (this is for a game that will eventually support a map editor). Besides, this would cause artifacts around the overlap area when things were zoomed way in (unless I did bevel-cut angles on the underlapping portion, which is an awful lot of work, and still causes problems at corners).

Is there some way I can combine these Rectangles into a single combined "shape" that does render without internal gaps? I've played around with GeometryDrawing, which does exactly that, but then I don't see a way to paint each RectangleGeometry with a different-colored brush.

Are there any other ways to get shapes to tile seamlessly under an arbitrary transform, without resorting to SnapsToDevicePixels?

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