Hey guys, Sprite DLight creator here.
Glad to see people talk about my project even before it goes live.
Sprite Lamp is a very good tool and it offers a lot of control over the resulting normal maps by combining multiple hand painted lighting profiles of the subject.
For users who have the time to paint the shading several times for each sprite, Sprite Lamp will probably be the tool of choice, as you can achieve a very good quality with it, depending on your artistic skills.
For projects like games featuring a lot of sprites and animations, Sprite DLight would be your choice, as it does the normal map generation automatically, based only on the original artwork, resulting in pretty solid normal maps, adjustable with various settings.
The GIMP/Photoshop plugins and common normal map generators are good for a bumpy 'bevel' look on textures like walls, however you won't be able to create a normal map for a character or object with them, as they only process local details, without respect to the overall shapes.
#1 Original sprite
#2 Normal map created by the GIMP plugin (same as PS plugin)
#3 Normal map created by a common normal map generator with the original sprite used as height map, followed by shape enhancement
#4 Normal map created by Sprite DLight in one click
#3 is the best result you can achieve with current automatic normal map generators combined with clever techniques, although the result is still pretty poor, it's more of a bevel effect, which is randomly concave or convex, particularly at the edges of the shape.
@Van B: Very impressive effect, I hope this encourages you guys to put some more work in this.
Still I'd like to know what you mean by going the extra mile.
@swissolo: You actually don't need to to combine anything for my tool, as you can just generate the normals from the diffuse map, which can look very bumpy with the right shape volume settings.
So, next-gen 8-bit games are perfectly possible, you can just process existing sprites and create your high-end pixel art game.
Awesome work, guys, this gives me hope that we will see dynamic lighting in AppGameKit soon.
By the way, the kickstarter for Sprite DLight will be launched this afternoon at 4:00pm CST.
I'd be happy to have some of you as backers or supporters who help to spread the word.
