I mentioned in my post last week that I was on the fence about purchasing Sprite Lamp. I’m happy to announce that fence is long gone. After a cordial interaction with the developer, I went for it. This post is going to be mostly about that, so there will be lots of pretty pictures.

Getting Started

After getting my download link and cracking open the software, I was immediately struck by the fact that I had no images suitable for lighting. The body work I had done in the past was fragmented and didn’t apply to the new Spine animations. I wasn’t sure how this would work with the vector graphics style I had going for my images so far, and I had no idea how to actually shade anything in that style either. I sketched out the outline of a Corinthian column header, exported it into gimp, and set to work trying to make gradients wrap around complex shapes. Needless to say, this didn’t work. I found a plugin that did a good bevel effect and set to using that to shade my object. It sort of worked, but it felt very round and fuzzy.

Initial inputs and static output. Apparently I can’t tell left from right at times.

Not so much teddy bear fuzzy, as doesn’t brush its teeth fuzzy.

It worked, sort of, and I had an object reacting to the light. I was ecstatic. I knew I could do better though, so the next day I set out to do just that. I had always wanted something closer to cel shading than normal lighting for this game, and getting smoothly-lit input images had been an incredible pain anyway. I decided to try and bake the cel shading into the lighting images used to generate the normal maps. This carried a couple of benefits. The first was that I no longer had to deal with creating perfectly smooth light maps. Creating cel-shaded input images in inkscape is pretty easy compared to making something perfectly smooth by hand or with linear gradients. It also means I don’t have to switch tools half-way through the process. The second benefit is that I can get something sort-of like cel shading without the somewhat erratic lines of light that normally come with those types of shaders. I wanted to test this quickly, so I made something very simple.

Clearly my mastery of lines and circles shows how great of an artist I truly am.

Painstaking Detail

This proved the concept, but it didn’t exactly look amazing. It looks closer to claymation than it does to cel shading, but I was pleased with it nonetheless. To make sure that the style held up in more complicated pieces, it was back to the column header. This took quite a while as I’m no master artist. Figuring out what the shapes should actually look like with orthogonal lighting was the biggest challenge; there aren’t a lot of references with that kind of lighting. After several hours tweaking nodes, I felt like I had something that might be passable. I have to say that I’m shocked with how nice this turned out, though I guess I wasn’t expecting much.

It kind of looks like a bucket. Catch the falling Cthulus mini-game, anyone?

Apparently it just needed a new toothbrush.

Lurking in the Shaders

With that, I decided I was content with my asset creation pipeline and decided to actually try and put this into the game. One of the key question I asked the developer before I bought this software was if it had an implementation for Unity. He said it had one, but it wasn’t fully done, and it wasn’t a top priority. Ok, not a big deal, I can work with partial support. It turned out though that partial support meant something different to me than it did to him. Hard edges on lights, no alpha transparency support, and a general approach that didn’t look like it was actually built for unity. I was a bit dismayed, but to his credit, he did warn me. I initially tried to get it working as-is, and when I saw that lights just stopped at their edge instead of falling off I knew I was going to be writing shaders for the rest of the weekend.

I kind of feel bad for that one off to the right. What did he do to deserve being ostracized?

Prior to this weekend, I had never touched 3D lighting. I’ve dabbled in shaders for special effects, but dealing with lights was completely foreign to me. The included implementation had a whole lot of vector math that I wasn’t comfortable with, so I prepared myself for the long haul. Just getting it to where I had it had taken the better part of a day, how long would it take to make a new one from scratch? Not long at all, it turns out. Unity does, occasionally, make something really easy for me. The built-in shader lab made getting that shader up and running incredibly easy. It doesn’t support all of the features that Sprite Lamp offers, but for my purposes, it’s perfect. In a matter of a couple of hours, I had every feature besides shadows, depth, and pixel snapping up and running. A few minutes later and I had the whole thing integrated into my existing project.

This is actually an awful screenshot to show off the shader. Programming: A+. Media: F-.

It felt like a very productive week, and I’m looking forward to working on integrating spine, and getting my procedural decorator up and running in the coming week. These should be the last two graphical development pieces for a good long while. After this it’s all content and gem programming. This is when things get really exciting.