Normal Map?

[CommanderMark4]

Hello, is there a tool for "normal mapping", like building "bumps" in a brick wall or something like that?

[Ninja Sprout]

No, but maybe in the future it can be implemented. I'll need to look into it and see how difficult it would be to add.

[CommanderMark4]

Originally posted by Ninja Sprout:

No, but maybe in the future it can be implemented. I'll need to look into it and see how difficult it would be to add.

Well in that case can I suggest an "easy" way that could work in pixel art? Create an object tied to a square that you select to use a "normal map" than let the user tell how deep the pixels go based on another tile in another sprite (the normal map one). You would have to let a new tile set to be selected inside the app to be a normal map, than the user would tell the depth of each pixel by color (the part of telling the depth is something I personally don't know about in other apps and it could be great to have).

[CommanderMark4]

The "depth of each pixel by color" part is about the color in the normal map, not the actual pixel art.

[Ninja Sprout]

Thanks for the suggestions- yeah, there would have to a normal map tileset tied to the tiles. I'll have to research it a bit to see what might be best way to do it, since I haven't explored normal mapping much myself.

[Uradamus]

For what it's worth, normal map means something very specific, which is changing the direction of a face at the pixel level and those directions are normalized, so the color of each pixel in a normal map is meant to represent a normalized vector (a vector of length 1.0) that tells the renderer which direction that pixel is supposed to be facing. There is absolutely 0 depth information in a proper normal map. There can, and usually is, a strength value associated with a normal map effect, but it is a material wide setting in most setups.

If you want depth you have to essentially add a separate depth/height map, often in the form of a gray scale bump map. In some games that is stored in the alpha channel of a normal map, but that isn't a given in most cases, as not all games support adjusting material depth, and each can have a different map load out for channel packing. You would also generally need to specify a mid point value, which is to say any pixel darker than this value is treated as going into the face and any pixel that is lighter than that value is coming out from the face, and again you would also have a material wide strength value for the overall effect. It is often referred to as parallax occlusion mapping, if you wanted to dig into the technique more.

It is likely well beyond the scope of what most users would ever need, and probably not really worth investing into. Even normal mapping is generally a step too far with pixel art stuff most of the time, but at least some folks have put it to compelling use at times, so that much should be ok and likely something that is already well supported in the libraries being used behind the scenes for this software.