$12256 / $11500
Hello. I'm one of lead Flare developers and want to ask for help from artists, that work with Blender. To add dynamic lights to Flare engine, we need 3 different types of textures, that should be rendered in Blender using already available Blender textures.
So we need
1. Diffuse texture
2. Ambient occlusion texture
3. Normal texture
For the beginning, let's have these for one of tilesets, and one of enemies (and for avatar). Having these will help in testing and polishing engine part.
Thanks a lot for help and leave your questions here, I will try to answer them if possible.
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Sorry if I'm way out of the loop, I saw this from the front page. Should I take this to mean Flare is going runtime 3D instead of pre-rendered isometric? Or are you just generating additional texture layers for the final isometric renders?
Either way, the ambient and diffuse should be easy, the normals could be difficult though. Just exporting the blender generated normals will work for smooth objects, but the current files will have no normal data for rough objects, and just generating normals from the diffuse will give suboptimal results. To get good normals you really want to create a higher poly version of each object in the game and then use those high poly models to generate normals for the low poly models. Are you happy with crappy normals for testing purposes? Also if the purpose of these textures are for dynamic lighting, won't you also want specular textures?
Flare remains isometric, we need additional texture layers for isometric renders to support dynamic lights. No need in specular textures(but it would be good to have it), also crappy normals would be good for now. We have script to generating character textures here https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game/blob/master/art_src/charact...
it would be good (and easier for you) if we have similar script for generating different textures (ao, normals and diffuse) for tilesets(?) and enemies(?).
Any update on this?
2D normal maps are a bit of a different beast that their 3D counterparts (although of course render wise the same).
I didn't have the opportunity to play around with these much, but I think its a great idea to use them in flare. Blender's normal map baking isn't geared towards screen space renderers for 2D sprites, but with a bit of googleing I came across this template of how to set up a renderer for it:
https://github.com/mattdesl/lwjgl-basics/tree/master/tools/blender-normals
I don't have access to my computer right now to give it a try (on holidays), but from the looks of it it should work with your FLARE render script.
Spec map can probably be done by applying different grayscale blender materials to models according to the shinyness of that part (the whiter the more shiny) and render them out as usual.
Diffuse would be just a less strongly lit version of what is currently in the game. Maybe try instead an full bright render with an ambient occlusion applied.
P.s.: I saw Cliff posting on the Godot engine forum and they are also working on isometric game support with normal maps right now... Maybe I am over interpreting this, but Flare with the Godot engine (on mobile platforms and with full shader support) would rock ;)
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Hi. I have found very usefull tool for generating textures (https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump/releases). Maybe using this will be easier the Blender (as our tiles are located in different Blender tiles, and must be moved to one spritesheet). Maybe generating one (normal .etc) texture from whole tileset can't be done, but at least cutting few images, generating and pasting back can be done.
I have tried to do so, but I am not a designer so can't say if my changes to texture are correct.