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  • Dynamic lighting with Sprite DLight

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Hey guys,

I would like to introduce the tool for game developers and artists I am currently running a pretty successful Kickstarter campaign for:

The main use of Sprite DLight is the generation of normal maps from 2D sprites in one click, which allows for quick and atmospheric dynamic lighting effects in 2D games:


"Selen Run Animation" from Timespinner, ©2014 Lunar Ray Games, animated dynamic lighting preview of the sprite sheet in Sprite DLight

In the Kickstarter video, there is an example of a character, animated in a Spine runtime, together with a normal mapped version of the atlas, and a shader.


Top left: Body parts of "Leutnant", © 2014 Philipp Lauthner, Bottom left: normal map generated by Sprite DLight from a slightly modified version of the original sprite, Right: shader preview in Jonas' Spine Shader

The challenges of the integration with Spine are currently:

  • The rotation of the bones has to be passed to the shader to display the normal maps correctly. A friend of mine (Jonas Jelli) wrote the shader you see in the video, and the normals already take the rotation into account there.
  • When processing an atlas with Sprite DLight, the shapes are 'inflated' from the edges to the center of each shape. This makes them look 'disconnected' to an extent. You can see this pretty good at joints like the elbows or the knees.
    I am looking for ways to solve particularly the second issue, and I am open to suggestions.

There are 24 hours left to get the tool at the Kickstarter backer price and to participate in the backer beta, which will start by the end of December.
All stretch goals are reached and the project is more than 650% funded.

Sprite DLight's Kickstarter campaign shows a lot of examples, including 3 videos.
The tool is also on Steam Greenlight, looking for more Yes votes.

Any kind of feedback and support is highly appreciated.

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Congratulations on making the kickstarter goal. The tool looks great.
Not sure how you can solve your second problem, I guess you would need to generate the normal map based on the "connected" version of the character and not the individual pieces, but if that is possible I can't tell.

Good luck with it! 🙂

Thank you, Søren 🙂

I thought about that, too.
However, the separation of the pieces after the generation of the normals cannot be resolved by the tool, so the user would still have to do quite some work. There are some of Spine users among the backers of Sprite DLight, maybe somebody comes up with the ultimate solution.

A short update: The Kickstarter is 450% funded with 8 days left.

Stretch goal 3 has been reached: a feature to re-render sprites for different environments, based on the normal map.


"Wolf where?" sprite sheet, ©2014 Kevin Chaloux, re-rendered for different environments with the normal map and lighting of Sprite DLight

7 أيام لاحقا

Great tool, does this normal map stuff work with rotated sprites? Is the lighting still correct?

edit: Didn't read all, my bad..., I'm not sure if it will fit for my spine animations, if the 2 problems with spine could be fixed somehow.

When processing a sprite (in this case an atlas), the whole image is treated the same way, as the tool doesn't have access to the json file associated with the image, but you could still use the rotation data of the json file when calculating the lighting in a shader.
Of course, this could be completely avoided by deactivating the rotation when packing the atlas.

10 أشهر لاحقا

Where can i found shader for spine + dlight in unity? Defualt spine shader (spine/skeleton_lit) does not have normal map. Is this shader included in DLight? Actually i would like to try it on my character before consider to buy. (Founded this thread in google, looking for a shader.)

2 أشهر لاحقا

This is an amazing tools for 2d animation, This can save time in different ways. Congrats on the kickstarter campaign!!

7 أعوام لاحقا

Does anyone know if there is a better version for this type of program by now? I downloaded it but I can't test it out on my latest version of macos so I'm looking to either fix this issue or find a better alternative.

jeffreynuez wrote

Does anyone know if there is a better version for this type of program by now? I downloaded it but I can't test it out on my latest version of macos so I'm looking to either fix this issue or find a better alternative.

Perhaps Laigter: https://azagaya.itch.io/laigter