Also check out Laigter if you want a free Open Source solution for making normal maps from 2D sprites.Imagine a game featuring pixel art and dynamic lighting. There are lots more methods for making normal maps if you have a look on the internet, but I’m done on this topic for now (until I find something else cool about it anyway □).Įdit February 2020: I’m not done yet… keep tuned for more normal map articles. Normal maps created with Sprite DLight on the left and Sprite Lamp on the right. After changes have been done put these into Sprite Lamp to generate the new normal map and make the process go a little faster. Using Sprite DLight you can export 4 of the directional auto generated light maps and then refine them in your graphics editing program. For a fast solution Sprite D Light is really handy as well if you want to try this technique for quickly lighting or recoloring 2d art. Sprite Lamp gave me a lot more control for making a normal map for my 2D art than Sprite Dlight (which I discussed in my previous article), but it was more time consuming. Normal map lighting in Photoshop using adjustment layers You could hand paint shine and glow effects on top though with different layer modes. I managed to get a similar look with the exported normal map in Photoshop, but things like specularity do not show up like in a 3D shader engine. This made a big difference to how the light affected the character on areas such as hair, the eye and buckles. I also made a specular map by turning the diffuse map black and white, adjusting the values and painting the areas I wanted to shine more a lighter color. Sprite Lamp has a nice preview mode that lets you try different lighting conditions. The normal, bump and ambient occlusion map were created in Sprite Lamp from my lighting profiles and diffuse map Texture map types loaded into Sprite Lamp. I exported the normal map for use in Photoshop. When I was happy with the small preview I used the large diffuse map and the large lighting profiles to generate the normal map, the bump map and the ambient occlusion map. I found it faster and more stable for testing to resize the artwork to a smaller size in the early stages of this process. The diffuse map or color map had to be a PNG file with a transparent background and all the lighting profiles were fine as flat JPEGs. Sprite Lamp worked very well for this considering this program is designed for small sprites, although it did close on some earlier attempts until I had figured out the correct file formats to use. The size of the final artwork I tested with Sprite Lamp was big at 1939 pixels by 3634 pixels. It was a useful exercise in trying different lighting directions on my character, and one I will keep practicing in the future. Secondly I had to keep redoing the lighting for each lighting profile so that they all looked consistent and made the output normal map look good. Firstly I did not know whether Sprite Lamp would cope with the high resolution art I used, given that it’s main purpose is for making normal maps for small game sprites to add dynamic lighting in game engines. This was an iterative and experimental process for me. Hand painted lighting profiles for the normal map creation in Sprite Lamp This involved creating 5 grey-scale lighting direction profiles for the character, top bottom right left and front (hand painted in Photoshop using the original illustration as a template). The illustration I want to create lighting effects from a normal map with Over the last four days or so I have used a program called Sprite Lamp to create a normal map for this illustration: They are usually “baked” from high detailed mesh sculpts into a normal map texture, which can then be applied to a low polygon model creating the illusion of high resolution detail. Normal maps are usually used in computer games and feature films to create the appearance of high detailed meshes. Red, green and blue correspond to the X, Y and Z orientation of the surface normal in a texture. It was a bit more time consuming to create the normal map as well as the illustration, but hand painting all the different lighting effects from scratch would take a lot longer without the normal map.Ī normal map uses three colors, red, green and blue to signify the direction of surface normal’s. You could hand paint the lighting without doing this of course, but I thought it was a cool technique to try and I’m learning about texture maps in the process. SPRITE DLIGHT VS SPRITE LAMP SOFTWAREI’ve been making normal maps out of my 2D art using specialized software to create adjustable lighting effects for my illustrations.
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