SPRITE LAMP VS SPRITEILLUMINATOR SOFTWARE
SPRITE LAMP VS SPRITEILLUMINATOR TRIAL
SPRITE LAMP VS SPRITEILLUMINATOR FREE

Sprite Lamp is primarily for the creation of normal maps, but it can also create depth maps. Indeed, it can be used on physical media as well – this plague doctor was drawn with a ball point pen and scanned in.Īfter being processed into a normal map and a depth map, the result looks like this: Sprite Lamp works well with pixel art, but it’s just as good with digital paintings, meaning you can keep your brush strokes where you want them to be. Sprite Lamp creates various maps from the lighting profiles – a normal map, a depth map, and an ambient occlusion map – and the result looks like this: Different visual styles With the zombie, we went with four.įrom here, you feed these lighting profiles into Sprite Lamp, a process which looks a bit like this: You can draw as few as two lighting profiles, and as many as five – the more you draw, the less physically accurate they have to be for good results. These are images of the subject, painted in greyscale (as though the subject was made of white plaster), with a single light source coming from a single direction. Having created this, the next step is to draw what I call ‘lighting profiles’. Our zombie’s diffuse map looks like this.

This will eventually become a diffuse map – that means that it’s a picture of the character with theoretical ‘perfect’ lighting from every angle. If you were wanting to make such a character with Sprite Lamp, here’s how you’d go about that.įirst, you will need to draw the outline of the character (or whatever). In the above example, we made a dynamically lit zombie. As an example, if you were making a pixel art game featuring zombies, here’s how one of those zombies might look if you were using Sprite Lamp: How it works What makes Sprite Lamp unique is that it creates these maps without ever needing to model anything in 3D – all the inputs can be hand drawn, and Sprite Lamp preserves the art styles that are possible with hand drawn images. Sprite Lamp aims to change that.Īt its core, Sprite Lamp is for creating standard assets – normal maps, depth maps, anisotropy maps, and ambient occlusion maps – to be used in the ways that common game engines are already using them.

One downside of this is that dynamic lighting, and the benefits that come with it in terms of atmosphere or gameplay, become much more difficult to achieve.

SPRITE LAMP VS SPRITEILLUMINATOR FREE

In case you’re here looking for information on getting a particular engine working with Sprite Lamp, here is a (short but growing) list of downloads and instructions for supported engines.įeel free to get in touch with any questions you have about Sprite Lamp via this contact form here.ĭespite the growing graphical power available to gamers on everything from consoles to phones, many game developers prefer to use 2D art in their games – often to preserve the style of their art, or just because 3D models can be expensive and difficult to work with.

SPRITE LAMP VS SPRITEILLUMINATOR TRIAL

You can also get the free trial for OSX, as well as getting the free trial for Linux (tested on Ubuntu – my Linux-fu is kind of weak so please get in touch if you encounter trouble with this version). There is also a free trial of Sprite Lamp for Windows. Sprite Lamp is available right now, via the humble widget (DRM-free), or via Steam: You can keep up to date with Sprite Lamp via twitter or facebook.

SPRITE LAMP VS SPRITEILLUMINATOR SOFTWARE

Sprite Lamp is a software tool to help game developers combine 2D art with dynamic lighting effects, through the creation of hand drawn normal maps.

Sprite lamp vs spriteilluminator