Hey Everyone, Does anybody know how I might be able to create an invisible hexagonal border in which I could then fill the entire region with color, but not have it spill outside of the boundary? I've been able to create a black border hexagon pattern with a 3 px thickness, but I want to be able to fill the entire region without having a different colored border. Thanks for your input!

The following assumes your using photoshop, however the steps are not to far off in other paint programs IE gimp. Shape tool FTW.


Well, you could use the pre-setup shapes under the shape tool. Create the shape you want, you can even create it as a filled shape, saving the extra step. If this is something your not familiar with, google photoshop basics tutorials - there is a ton, and a lot of them go above and beyond what you'd expect in free tutorials.

Opening up mine I'll give you the basic steps -

Shape tool, default is a square. Your going to select polygone. Select your sides. You want to change the default color from black (its located at the top of the screen) you can select the color you want here. You may need to use the transform tool to rotate it to the correct angle you wish for the polygone, to do so, hit CTRL+T and you'll get a select box. Click on one of the corners, wait for your mouse icon to look like a arrow turned and you can change the direction of it, when your done, simply hit enter to rasterize the transform otherwise you can't hit any other option :)

At the top also, is a square with some points, a pen looking icon, and a square. If you want to create the polygons with the correct border, then fill them afterward, you can select the second square box, and it should create the empty shapes.

There is a few alternative ways to do this also, however, this is the simplest fastest way to get a filled + shape onto your screen.

Sometimes anti-aliasing can mess with your borders too, so depending on what your using this for IE sprites, turning off antialiasing in photoshop will assure your borders, will being a little pixelated ;) will be 1 uniform color, and not have any AA holes which can happen occassionally with alpha blending.

Using the shape tool is probably the best solution. But just as a general tip, whenever you want an invisible border you should either be using a layer mask (for a permanent reusable border) or the polygon lasso tool (for a temporary hand-drawn border). I believe both of these options are basically the same in Gimp.

Also, you can right-click and save your current selection so you can get it back whenever you want. This let's you draw complex lasso selections without fear of losing them permanently the first time you want to select something else.