Gaussian blur spritesheet/texture atlas without clipping edges

Question

I'm trying to apply a Gaussian blur to a shadow to soften them a bit. I can apply the blur fine, but the problem is that I end up with this:

Instead of this:

Which isn't great. The image is part of a spritesheet with a single pixel gutter around each frame.

I don't want to have to go back and add gutters big enough to accommodate the blur to every single frame of every spritesheet. Additionally because of the way the sprites have to be sorted I can't render all the shadows to a render target and then blur the entire target. I can achieve the effect I want with a sprite as a single image instead of as a spritesheet. I do that by creating the triangles 20% bigger than they need to be and then sampling the texture outside the bounds when the UV addressing is set to clamp. That doesn't work with a spritesheet though because then it just starts sampling the frames on either side of the current frame.

Is there a way to achieve what I want with a shader or other trickery? I really don't want to have to alter every spritesheet.

Answer 1

This is an issue with any non 1x1 filter(such as a Gaussian one). If you don't want to clip, you can not apply the filter on the edge, or apply only part of it(and it will be darker probably). Another option, if the background outside the image, is known to be a specific color or transparency, is when you apply the filter, apply that color as part of the filter outside the image for border pixels.