Artwork and art-direction for Dominator game & Sprite Lamp

raxter

http://hundredsofsparrows.com/ttw/index.php/project/dominator/



http://www.spritelamp.com/

Aesthetic beauty and technical beauty, for artists and programmers alike (and I'm sure all other forms of human being)

On another note, if anyone has a picture shaded from 2 directions to share with me, I'd like to see if I can whip up a shader in Unity that does something similar to SpriteLamp. Can't promise anything so just if anyone happens to have something lying around already or if it's something that won't be too much effort. It'll probably not be as sophisticated at the SpriteLamp examples on their website, but worth a shot and I'll be happy to share any code experience I have doing it.

Also if anyone wants to join me for an orgy with the artwork in Dominator, me and my eyes are planning to make love with it throughout the day

creative630

Sprite lamp is so cool!

iceblademush

Wow Sprite Lamp is cool, but you can also do that with baking normal maps to sprites? So you have a flat sprite , and then a normal mapped version. Of course you would have to render the sprite from a 3d object.

Its just that handpainting 4 different sprites for 1 sprite is a bit time consuming, 3d would be quicker?
The effect is easier to do in 3d on the brick wall for instance.

But nice find and always interesting to see new developments, and it looks really cool. Im just thinking from an artist point of view how much EXTRA work it is :P

Elyaradine

I did something earlier at the start of the year.



Mine's kind of the same as what he does, except that I feel that how colours appear in light and shadow changes depending on the type of material and what colour you're working on. Colours with different chroma will tend to hue shift a little. I feel that treating it the way he does, it's really hard not to end up with dull, muddy colours in the end. So... because of that, I painted a light and shadow version of the sprites, and used the normal mapped luminance to choose which version of the texture I wanted to show.

You can possibly get by with painting only a height map, and letting one of the height-to-normal map conversion plugins (xNormal, Nvidia [eugh], nDo/nDo2) to create the others for free.

The original idea (the first time I saw it, that is) was over a year ago as a 7MB gif. I linked it on this forum somewhere...

Tuism

Edit: Just saw that it's a system to make dynamically lit 2D stuff - so Sprite Lamp makes the maps, and then, how do you implement it? Why would you need to have sprite lamp do the maps if you're drawing them yourself? *noobconfusion*

Is it the same way this was done? This is Confederate Express, also on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/829559023/confederate-express)



I'm super interested in how this would work - I have next to no idea what height maps and normal maps are though :(

iceblademush

@Tuism
Looks like Conferderate uses a similar method, but they have 8 final sprites that are blended together for the final result, where as the others use a height map blended with colour to get their result.

With regards to normal mapping: (from polycount)
A Normal Map is usually used to fake high-res geometry detail when it's mapped onto a low-res mesh. The pixels of the normal map each store a normal, a vector that describes the surface slope of the original high-res mesh at that point. The red, green, and blue channels of the normal map are used to control the direction of each pixel's normal.

In simple terms its a 3d bump map that uses the RGB to fake the bumps in a 3d space. Its those weird purple and blue maps you always see. :)