Pixel Joint Forum: Pixel Normal Techniques in UE4

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Backstory stuff
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Hey everybody, I've been meaning to share some cool stuff I worked on. Maybe this might be useful for people who want to create variable lighting conditions on their pixel art.

I worked for the past few years for a company called Exato Game Studios that put out a game called Elo Hell, a narrative game about a kid that wants to become an E-sports star. Inside that game was a the game he plays called Echo Star (a turn-based sci-fi strategy game).

We built several mini-games for our narrative game and in one I created a pixel art version of our sci-fi world.

You can see the end product on our second video on the Steam page as well as the 3D units that the 2D assets were based on in some of the 3D shots:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/655940/Elo_Hell/
Direct link:
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/256758366/movie480.webm?t=1565114231

****************************Techniques to create lighting in UE4
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I'm afraid I can't speak to the programmer side of the level building, but I created most of the art assets and worked a lot with the lighting. It seemed easiest to put this into an image...

https://i.imgur.com/2OA4BhZ.png
edit: forum seems to refuse to recognize even a direct image link to imgur so the image is directly added below as well.

Maybe other people are doing lighting in programs designed more toward use of pixel art, but I enjoyed this and found it created some neat results. I bet it could be made to change lighting dynamically with the right understanding of UE4 techniques as well. AMA if you want.

Thanks!

PS. Thanks to the whole Exato team, but especially my awesome art director Stephanie Paul who suggested this sort of thing and showed me how I could get normals to workin UE4.

Author	Message
Iscalio Commander Joined: 29 March 2023 Online Status: Offline Posts: 224	Topic: Pixel Normal Techniques in UE4 Posted: 14 January 2020 at 6:20pm
	********** Backstory stuff ******** Hey everybody, I've been meaning to share some cool stuff I worked on. Maybe this might be useful for people who want to create variable lighting conditions on their pixel art. I worked for the past few years for a company called Exato Game Studios that put out a game called Elo Hell, a narrative game about a kid that wants to become an E-sports star. Inside that game was a the game he plays called Echo Star (a turn-based sci-fi strategy game). We built several mini-games for our narrative game and in one I created a pixel art version of our sci-fi world. You can see the end product on our second video on the Steam page as well as the 3D units that the 2D assets were based on in some of the 3D shots: https://store.steampowered.com/app/655940/Elo_Hell/ Direct link: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/256758366/movie480.webm?t=1565114231 ************************ Techniques to create lighting in UE4 ************************** I'm afraid I can't speak to the programmer side of the level building, but I created most of the art assets and worked a lot with the lighting. It seemed easiest to put this into an image... https://i.imgur.com/2OA4BhZ.png edit: forum seems to refuse to recognize even a direct image link to imgur so the image is directly added below as well. Maybe other people are doing lighting in programs designed more toward use of pixel art, but I enjoyed this and found it created some neat results. I bet it could be made to change lighting dynamically with the right understanding of UE4 techniques as well. AMA if you want. Thanks! PS. Thanks to the whole Exato team, but especially my awesome art director Stephanie Paul who suggested this sort of thing and showed me how I could get normals to workin UE4.
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NancyGold Commander Joined: 27 October 2021 Online Status: Offline Posts: 526	Posted: 21 January 2020 at 7:37am
	Looks like usual bump mapping, which was a stereotypic 90ies effect in Demoscene. More advanced technique is having several of these normal maps and interpolating between them. It can be done with usual already lighted sprites by splitting them into luma and chroma components - the luma would serve as normal map, if it was drawn using consistent light angle.
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