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[Robotacon]

Hello,
I'd like some help from the indie croud. I'm experimenting with bump mapping my sprites for a game and I have a couple of issues that surfaces when working with small textures.



First of all I'm using normal maps created from bump maps. But I loose too much information when turning the depth map into a normal map which is done by sampling the pixels around each pixel.

Eh... now that I'm writing this I came up with a great solution to this problem. I'll just create my height(bump maps at a much higher resolution than my pixel art so that I can make up for the loss of date due to approximating the surface normals.

Anyhow, has anyone else tried bumpmapping pixel art with good results?

Check out more artwork over at Pixelation

I've got alot of help from this XNA example

[ravuya]

I understand Black Sky uses normal mapping for their sprites.

I'd also like to try this, I just don't think it would have that big of a payoff considering the amount of work that'd go into it.

I have had this link floating around in my bin for quite some time; it appears according to the article, there is a tool in XNA to turn a heightmap into a normal map -- which is what you're doing now, I assume.

[Robotacon]

It's actually not that bad making height maps. I honestly hated it in the beginning but it's not much extra work than what you have to consider when drawing pixel art in general. It's just information spread over two sprite sheets instead of one.

The "tool" in XNA that you're talking about is some code you can download for a content pipeline that turns a height map into a normal map when you're loading the image from file. I've taken that code an rewritten parts of it to work better for my needs. I think it's originally meant to work for regular 3D games and not for bump mapping tiny tiny sprite sheets and 8x8 blocks.

That sample also comes with a normal map pixel shader that I've rewritten to only output a fixed set of 16 colors to that I won't lose the pixel art feel.

The reason I'm setting up the light this way in Arcade Academy is purely because I hope that it will give the artwork a coherent look and hopefully distinguishing it from all other retro styled platformers.

I don't know what's up with the XNA forum, I can seem to get in there any longer.

[Blaster]

Whilst I have no knowledge of these things and can't help in any way, I have been lurking at pixelation, and am really quite excited to see how this turns out. A dynamic light source that retains a hand-pixeled look would be just about the coolest thing.

Not that your pixel work isn't already very nice in itself! Best of luck with this!

[PHeMoX]

Actually, that should be relatively easy... you can make a shader do texture look ups for the shading, basically in a toon-shader style, but with a pixely color gradient. Mmmm, it's worth trying out. Too bad the engine I'm using doesn't allow for shaders on sprites just yet, I can use a model with a sprite as skin though.

It's definately worth checking out. 

[Robotacon]

I've got the code for the pixel shader working and with better normal maps I'll get sharper and more accurate results then what I'm getting now.

I'm currently looking into implementing dynamic 2d shadows for background elements. Or if it's too much of a hassle, static shadows for the backgrounds and dynamic for all game objects.