Art/Lighting Experiments

[Saria]

dczanik your stuff is always of such high quality. We're all lucky that you're here and treating us with your work!

[zenzmurfy]

Awesome!

I don't know anything about normal maps yet.

Is this link relevant to what you are doing?

http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html

[dczanik]

Awesome!

I don't know anything about normal maps yet.

Is this link relevant to what you are doing?

http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html

Just a quick perusal seems to suggest it is.

Check out this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OW2PTkSVNM
Also sent it to your email.

Saria, I could honestly say the same about you. Thank you, so much.

[Dragon]

Redundant post - 'cause I went back and read your initial post more thoroughly.

You're using Sprite Lamp to generate your normal maps right? Because drawing normal maps by hand is painful beyond reason and not something I'd wish on my second worst enemy.

[dczanik]

Redundant post - 'cause I went back and read your initial post more thoroughly.

You're using Sprite Lamp to generate your normal maps right? Because drawing normal maps by hand is painful beyond reason and not something I'd wish on my second worst enemy.

It's still a lot of work. Basically, I have to create 4 extra drawings. Keep in mind, these were just quick tests:

Original (Diffuse):


Lit from the top:


Lit from the bottom:


Lit from the left:


And, lit from the right:


There's also 3 optional views:
A front lighted view (imagine if the camera had a light on it),
an emitter view (things that emit their own light),
and a specular view (drawing the shininess of the object).

All that creates this:


Use the normal map to calculate lighting, and you get something like this:

[Dragon]

It's still a lot of work. Basically, I have to create 4 extra drawings. Keep in mind, these were just quick tests:
...

Oh! I had assumed that the HD ships were stylised or filtered renders of 3D models. In which case getting a normal for them would have been easy: bake model normals onto plane, done.

Then I zoomed in a bit on your examples and noticed brush strokes and was all like "hold on, that's not rendered!". I see now how drawing lighting from four directions per HD ship could get a little tedious.

Normal maps are a really neat solution to the 2D lighting problem though. I tried solving this by rendering out every lit frame for 72 frames of rotation for every Star Control ship, missile or whatever. I can't find that texture but is was more than 2GB uncompressed which didn't fit into any graphics cards memory at the time.

[Angelfish]

Redundant post - 'cause I went back and read your initial post more thoroughly.

You're using Sprite Lamp to generate your normal maps right? Because drawing normal maps by hand is painful beyond reason and not something I'd wish on my second worst enemy.

It's still a lot of work. Basically, I have to create 4 extra drawings. Keep in mind, these were just quick tests:

Original (Diffuse):


Lit from the top:


Lit from the bottom:


Lit from the left:


And, lit from the right:


There's also 3 optional views:
A front lighted view (imagine if the camera had a light on it),
an emitter view (things that emit their own light),
and a specular view (drawing the shininess of the object).

All that creates this:


Use the normal map to calculate lighting, and you get something like this:

The fucked up thing about the Nemesis is that the cannon rotates so you have to do all those possible combinations too .

[dczanik]

That's one of those things that I haven't figured out. In order to do the above, the turret would have to cast a shadow on the main hull of the ship. It's a little tricky to do that in 2D.

[Niffiwan]

WOW!

That is astonishing! It's really wonderful to see 2D pixel art advancing in this way. I really think that this is a big leap forward. If you get this working, I imagine you'll constantly have game-creators contacting you to find out how to do it in their own games.

Also, I notice that the default lighting setting is a kind of bright-white fluorescent-like light. I wonder if there can be different shades of light in front of different sorts of stars?

As for the Chenjesu, yeah, each side of the crystal would have to gradually change in hue rather than brightness.

[darklord42]

were you ever successful in finding a coder, cause I will gladly turn the internet upside-down to find you one.