Any tips and tricks to make smoother and less jagged angles?

I am experimenting with having the head of my character being set to the angle of the mouse, so that he is always looking at the mouse. The problem though is that the image gets extremely jagged and blurry when not looking at a straight angle forward,down or up. I wonder if there is any tricks one can do to make this smoother and look less jagged and blurry?

One potential thing I am thinking about is if it could improve things if not just having one frame of the head but instead like 3 or 5 where the you paint the head at an angle in between so that it can change to that image as you increase the angle and then get a smoother transition instead of basing all the angles on just one image? I dont know if that makes sense and if that could work and how to actually do it or if there is also other methods?

I know there are programs like Spine etc that lets you move things in smooth angles, could this work by inserting it into something like that and adjusting the angle and exporting it or would it just mess up the sprite badly if it is pixelart?

I have attached the example of mario with his head angled toward the mouse

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Quote from nasirfoxx

When setting the angle, just set the quality parameter to 0. Using maximum quality deliberately anti-aliases it
Won't stop it from being jagged tho, but that does fix the blurring

Yes this looks slightly better (or worse) in some instances but I am looking for other tricks if there is any. I am curious if having more than one single frame of the head in one position could help for example so all angles are not based on the one frame but some other that have had a slight manual angle? Like if you have 3 frames of the head, one the normal but then where you have painting it looking diagonaly up and down also and change to these as the angle reach a certain point?

Quote from nasirfoxx

Maybe that could work, but for manual angles you could also use RotSprite (Please login to see this link.)

Thanks that is a neat program! I tried it out on the Mario head and the additional 2 directions actually look kind of good

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Having to add manual adjustments for each direction would probably be massive work, but this is really nice still for changing manual angle vs photoshop. I don't think it is an option for dynamic angle when you need that but in other cases it could be really neat!

On a separate point in my example, I am using an old formula I made way back but I only got it to work with having the actual head sprite facing the wrong way and being upside down. It is kind of annoying and is it possible to adjust the formula so I can have the head sprite sit in the correct way without having it upside down?