Sprite DLight normal maps and Visionaire

Hey guys,

I have been watching the amazing progress of shader implementation for Visionaire which is being discussed here: Visionaire SHADER ToolKit Demo.
In this context, I would like to introduce the normal map generating tool I am working on.
Sprite DLight is currently running a pretty successful Kickstarter campaign and here is a quick infograph to show what it does:
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More information and lots of previews can be found on the Kickstarter page of Sprite DLight.

The combination of both techniques brings amazing possibilities like dynamic lighting in 2D games, which allows for a three dimensional look for characters and objects.
You could also process sprites of classical games and do an atmospheric remake of your favourite old-school adventure game.
Feedback and feature requests are welcome.

I will be watching the awesome things going on in this forum and I would love to see normal mapped characters in Visionaire soon.

Dennis

Looks very interesting mate. Especially if it makes it easy to create various normal/depth maps for characters/objects.

I guess we'll have to see what Simon decides to do in regards to implementing/allowing normal maps. I don't really know much about them to be honest & have only read a few articles here & there. But they do sound/look very interesting in regards to adding dynamic lighting/shadow to specific objects, which is something I believe 2D games could really do with.

Good luck with the rest of your campaign (although I see you've already smashed your base target) & good luck with the rest of the creation of your tool.

Thank you
It's pretty simple and straightforward to generate normal maps for 2D art with the tool, and the intensity, volume and other things can be adjusted with sliders.

Thanks for the nice words, things are going quite well and there's already some engines that are ready to use this technique. But unfortunately no adventure game engine yet
The previews of the shader thread are absolutely amazing, so I really hope, Simon will do some more work on the shader toolkit, particularly adressing normal maps.

I love the idea, a good WYSIWYG editor. I wish that Normal Map be part of the Visionaire engine ; It would be awesome, I don't know if it's possible to integrate this tech. Visionaire Studio v5 or v6, who knows .

Actually it's not that hard, I just have to write some shader, I may combine that with the current lighting in the shader toolkit, That would require doing deferred shading, again not that problem. Problem is where to set what image uses what normal maps, I cannot really append a field for every sprite in the engine. So I think I will require setting the paths with lua for the time until a new gui is finished.

Simon, that already sounds good. Wouldn't it be possible to access the normal maps with a suffix to the name of the sprite?

I've got some news, too. Sprite DLight now has four stretch goals:

• Lighting preview (already reached)
  
• Mac version
  
• Re-Rendering
  
• Manual artistic control
  

To elaborate on these, I made another video, showing all features in action. The video is included in the Kickstarter update:


Re-rendering would of course still be an option to get some more atmosphere, but I think you guys are not too far from making REAL dynamic lighting possible for Visionaire.

Sprite DLight has just reached the second stretch goal: The tool will also be available for Mac!

There is a new feature: an animated dynamic lighting preview for sprite sheets!
Click the image for the full update, including a video clip showing the new feature!


"Selen Run Animation", ©2014 Lunar Ray Games, animated dynamic lighting preview of the sprite sheet in Sprite DLight

The final week of the Kickstarter campaign is running, all stretch goals are smashed!

I am currently redesigning the UI:

Here is another application like this. Call Spritelamp:
http://www.snakehillgames.com/spritelamp/

“

Here is another application like this. Call Spritelamp:
http://www.snakehillgames.com/spritelamp/

„

He actually mentions & talks about Spritelamp on the kickstarter page. I think what he wanted to do though was create a tool that is much simpler to use with various preset options as well as the ability to customize as needed.