this is either awesome or completely retarded, and I can't decide which:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/finnmorgan/sprite-lamp-dynamic-lighting-for-2d-art 

 

A QExpo. 

 

It looks cool, I hope it works out.

However, I've done that in the past by... drumroll... handpainting the normals. :P And this software does it by... handpainting the normals? :/

It's easy enough, just do 4 direcions, combine vertical in X, horizontal in Y and run it through a normalizer.

Problem I have with these tools is there's a lot of half baked ones around. Crazybump was most useful untill development just stopped. And now there's things like nDo for PS which have good features but are slow as hell and still have messy integration.

Still, more and better tools never hurt. 

would it not be possible to do only two directions (north-east and south-west) instead of four? 4 extra frames is a big jump in work. 

There's also Knald (https://www.knaldtech.com/) which is sort of a CrazyBump replacement, but is actively being developed. 

Using 4 frames is much more verbose and averages out any error. You can also do 2 drawings, simply the horizontal and vertical but use 3 tones per channel (dark, light, midtone). The downside is you'll need to manage the transitions carefully or it might be easy to end up with pillow shading. I think it's easier for a lot of people to break it down into 2 seperate lights per channel mentally -- addition is more how light is supposed to work. If you're an experienced painter you can simply do the X/Y axis. I think using only 2 channels in a opposite diagonal way means the artist needs to manage his midtone very carefully and the program's heuristic might screw up.

Anyway, this is a bit of a chicken egg problem also. I did try the handpainting normal sprites once, but the issue was there were no easy 2.5D engines available I could test it with. And I'm too stupid to program something myself. 

http://zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html 

Nowadays one could just take some more photos and generate a 3D model instead. 

but you need much more sophisticated software for that 

http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/

http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ 

Check trades in steam OMG! >:{ >:{ >:{ >:{ >:{ >:{ 

 

I remember downloading the shareware version from AOL over a 14.4 modem (or was it a 9600 ?). It took hours. Didn't do anything but play Doom for weeks after. 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103820202076335&set=a.10100353385100345.2974285.12403683&type=1&theater 

submarine game. Can i be submariner captain. I be really good at it. 

Perfect cannon fodder candidate. 

'Natural selection in action' 

BWAHAHAHA 

Cudos to mr.T 

What, why?
I've been AFK for a few days. 

nothing serious just wondered if you wanted to trade some metro cards (serious business you understand). 

Thanks Mr. S. I do appreciate it.
Thankfully Mr. Night, Mr. Shade, Mr. Hand, and Mr. Glove are all still here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOdY2_RsKHs
I went with a very broad sense of ancient Egypt, places beyond worlds, and general weirdness. Mr. L.'s story "Nyarlathotep" is nightmarishly suggestive, and I'd like to see more tries at it.