Best way to generate drop shadows for sprites?
by CM Schmied · in Artist Corner · 06/27/2012 (10:27 pm) · 0 replies
Basically I need to create drop shadows for my sprites in game but I'm not sure what would be the best method to do so. I see two options right now (feel free to expand on that):
1. "Bake" them in to the sheet by rendering them along with each sprite so a transparent shadow is in each frame. I'm currently making the sprites in a 3D program and then rendering the necessary frames and organizing them in a sprite sheet. I guess I would just have the model cast a shadow on a plane underneath it and take the alpha of that. The downside is that in game the shadows would change direction as the sprite rotated (it's a straight top down perspective) so I would have to make the shadow directly underneath the sprite so it didn't look strange.
2. Figure out a way to make the drop shadow generate in game. Unfortunately I'm an artist and not a programmer so I'm a little out of my depth on this and don't even know if this possible with Torque. I am working with a programmer but it would help a great deal if I could point him in the right direction. I saw some scripting that had to do with drop shadows for text but I wasn't sure if that was applicable.
Ideally I would like it to look like the "Hospital Havoc" game on the I iTorque 2D page. Link to video: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-2d/iphone. Is that generated dynamically or is that shadow they cast just part of the sprite sheet?
1. "Bake" them in to the sheet by rendering them along with each sprite so a transparent shadow is in each frame. I'm currently making the sprites in a 3D program and then rendering the necessary frames and organizing them in a sprite sheet. I guess I would just have the model cast a shadow on a plane underneath it and take the alpha of that. The downside is that in game the shadows would change direction as the sprite rotated (it's a straight top down perspective) so I would have to make the shadow directly underneath the sprite so it didn't look strange.
2. Figure out a way to make the drop shadow generate in game. Unfortunately I'm an artist and not a programmer so I'm a little out of my depth on this and don't even know if this possible with Torque. I am working with a programmer but it would help a great deal if I could point him in the right direction. I saw some scripting that had to do with drop shadows for text but I wasn't sure if that was applicable.
Ideally I would like it to look like the "Hospital Havoc" game on the I iTorque 2D page. Link to video: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-2d/iphone. Is that generated dynamically or is that shadow they cast just part of the sprite sheet?
