Dynamic Lighting For Pixel Art Tutorial - Now You Know Too

hey everyone my name is artindi and i'm going to show you how to make your pixel art sprites light up like this [Music] a normal map is a texture that uses blue red and green colors to help your computer or game engine understand surface directions for each pixel in a 2d image in order to figure out how light should interact with that image it's a bunch of sciency math stuff that i'm sure is really cool but i mean as long as it works who cares most methods for creating a normal map are very complicated or unreliable at least in my experience especially for pixel art so i'm going to show you how to make a normal map by hand for your pixel art sprites find a normal map sphere on the internet that you like and download it open it in a sprite or whatever program you're using and remove any background colors adjust the size down to something more workable such as 64 by 64. now depending on the game engine you are using and the direction of x and y in that game engine you will need to orient the normal map sphere to reflect that for example in godot the x-axis counts up to the right but the y-axis increases as you move down so for me i'm going to just invert the sphere upside down once you have the orientation the way you need it to be then you are ready for study pick the sprite you wish to create a normal map for and revert it to its base colors make a copy of it and plop it down in a canvas next to your normal map sphere this step is the hardest part but i'm sure it becomes easier with practice imagine different surface directions on your sprite and try to find surfaces on the sphere that face the same direction recolor your sprite according to matching surfaces for example this surface perhaps is facing at an angle up to the right so we will take a color that seems to be in that direction as well on the sphere and fill it in here's a few tips for you remember that pixlr is simple so try to keep your normal map just as simple and unless the matching surface is facing you try to use surfaces on the sphere that are more towards the outer edges i found i get a cleaner result if i do that you probably won't get it right the first time for each sprite especially at first so leave your image editor open to tweak the normal map while testing it in your game engine save or import your base color sprite and normal map into your game engine make sure both are aligned perfectly before you do then go ahead and use them in whatever way your game engine requires in the godot engine all you need is a 2d node and just click and drag the sprite and normal map into the respected fields this method is not perfect but with practice i'm sure you can get pretty good overall it is the easiest way that i have found to dynamically light my sprites and i felt it would be good to share so i guess [Music] thank you so much for watching you guys are always so awesome if you know any other cool ways to create a normal map please let us know in the comments i mean people are watching this video because they're trying to find a good way to do that so you know help us out but thank you so much and have a beautiful day

Channel: Artindi

Views: 37,631

Keywords: normal map, how, pixel, art, pixelart, normal, map, godot, simple, easy, to, make, best, way, tutorial, short, artindi, aseprite, pixel-art, normal-map, hand, draw, your, own, fast, method

Id: vOXrrEvYUVg

Length: 3min 3sec (183 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020