Hi Casey,

I have found these two apps earlier that are for generating normal maps from 2D sprites.

Sprite DLight is still in early access on Steam, but it looks very promising basically it says that with one click it can generate normal map from a 2D sprite. Check it out at at Steam http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=340326626 or at its original Kickstarter project: https://www.kickstarter.com/proje...-maps-for-2d-graphics/description

The other one is already available to buy. It is called Sprite Lamp, but this one requires more work from the artist, if I got it right. It is available at http://store.steampowered.com/app/316830/

Maybe you could use one of them for next weeks' lighting programming. Although for getting Sprite DLight you may have to contact the author.

In addition to normal map creation: I made 2007 a normal map generator which generates normal maps from bitmap or greyscale textures.
Its works very well, even under windows 8.1. It supports non-filtering or sobel 5x5 filtering and saves TGA 24+32 Bit and JPG and Bitmap as well.

I will try to find the old source code in my basement and post it here if there are interests in.

You can find the application here:
http://root.xenorate.com/final/programs/nmapgen1_0.zip

Have phun,
Final

I actually do have a copy of Sprite DLight. Unfortunately it's still pretty early and doesn't really seem to work all that well. It's still in pretty active development. But I'll keep an eye on it. Truth be told, it's not particularly difficult to write a tool that does what these tools do so if there's nothing available by the time we need to start shipping real assets, I'll just write one myself.

- Casey

Casey, will you code this or other supporting tools on the stream?

/Kim

I would think something like lighting would be part of the engine and would do inside of the engine instead of using a tool?

I would also like to see him code this tool live if he has too.

I'm not going to include pipeline stuff on the stream in general - we'll just be doing stuff by spec, ie., "here is what the game loads", and we'll be assuming that the assets got made somehow. I feel like it is important to have well defined boundaries about what gets covered to prevent the videos from being 2000+ hours :)

- Casey

Incidentally, Pixar just re-released their classic texture collection under a CC-BY licence. They're at higher resolution than they were in 1993 (1024x1024 goodness) and now include bump and normal maps.

So if anyone wants some bump and/or normal maps to play with, this is a great selection.

I use SpriteLamp to generate normal and AO maps. It works very well. Although, it still requires a couple of lighting profile images to perform the generation (check the link). They're very simple to make as a programmer, as they are just grayscale images with basic highlighting.