Anybody played around with Sprite Lamp for textures?

[david_a]

Sprite Lamp is a neat program for doing lighting on pixel art. The demos on the site are pretty impressive:



I've found a brief mention in the forums daydreaming about using it for sprites (I guess with engine support for truly dynamic lighting) but that sounds like a massive amount of work.

I think using it for textures should be much more doable - it can also "bake" lighting into static textures. I recall a few Doom wads that have had textures with spotlights and stuff on them but it's such a pain to do it manually it's not that common. You can't go crazy with the effects since Doom's sector lighting will ruin the illusion of real lightmaps, but it should be possible to make some textures with some added depth to them. I was actually pondering using it for a Wolfenstein level in ECWolf - instead of those overhead light sprites with the spotlight being part of the sprite, there would be a different flat under the light that has the spotlight baked into it.

It's on sale now on Steam during the Summer Sale; I was thinking of picking it up.

EDIT: I found another tool called Sprite DLight that is similar. This one claims to work with only a single shaded sprite/texture as input, which sounds great if it actually works.

[droscoe]

Found this. Not sure how you get this in game though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZromnvS4pvM

[scifista42]

droscoe said:

Not sure how you get this in game though.

By saving the graphics you made in Sprite Lamp, then including them into your wad as custom sprites, then running the wad.

[droscoe]

No. You can't have normal maps on sprites, dynamic lights don't cast light on parts of sprites.

[40oz]

As a texture artist, I can't say I'd use something like this. I don't think I'd have much use for it because I generally draw textures as if they are fullbright, and use sectors to create shadows and stuff. It's a really fascinating program going by the demonstrations I've seen. How does it recognize depth in the flat images? Does it recognize shapes based on the light-to-dark gradients of pixels from a similar color?

[boris]

As I understand it, it creates a normal map from 4 (?) images that are lit from 4 different sides.

[david_a]

Yeah, you have to give it a flat-shaded color version and gray scale images showing lighting from different directions. The site has examples of what the inputs looks like.

Sprite DLight claims to support determining the depth info from a single image, but I have to imagine that is very hit-and-miss. It's not as far along so there's not a lot of info on how well it works.

You can see a snippet of a 2D game using normal maps for lighting in the Sprite DLight kickstarter video. Honestly it's a bit... underwhelming. The super-smooth lighting makes the effect fairly subtle and I'm not sure I would notice it when playing the game.

Theoretically someone could create sprites + normal maps for all the Doom enemies and implement engine support for it, but I think the result would be similarly disappointing. I think it's one of those ideas like voxel enemy models that sound like it would be neat but wouldn't really be worth the insane amount of work to convert the existing resources.

Using it for stuff like spotlights on textures sounds more doable but it still seems like a lot of work when I think about it more.