E-Man's Sprite R & D

[TheShyGuy]

Yeah, I was talking about the goomba's right foot. You should just focus on making sure the animation is smooth, not the translation stuff. If people makes games with your sprites, the gifs are useless. Baking the translation into the frames would be a headache for others since they've got to undo that.

For the human above, try shading according to the surface normal. I'm no artist, but I messed with 3D graphics programming and one of the first things I did was make a sunlight/directional light shader (no self shading though). The intuition learned from looking at the code is that directional light basically operates on the surface normals, not placement of the surface. So when thinking about what surface you're trying to shade and think about the direction the surface normal is pointing to relative to the sunlight/directional light.

In case this helps with intuition, a part of the code:

Code:

//calculate the amount of light on this pixel
lightIntensity = saturate(dot(pixelNormal,-lightDirection));

dot(): returns a value [-1,1] of how "much" the two vectors (normal, -light direction) are in the same direction.

1 Being same direction, which is why the light direction is negated.
If the pixelNormal and the (positive) light direction face towards eachother, then it's fully lit (but the dot returns -1)

-1 means that the (negative)light direction and the pixel normal point away from eachother, and therefore should not be lit

saturate() just clamps the value to [0,1]

That's all there is to it =p.