Lighting and preview

View modes

At the right of the options bar, and under View.

• Art — the artwork, untouched. For checking a hint against the line it is correcting.
• Lit — the artwork lit by the normal map. This is the one to judge by.
• Normal — the map itself. Useful for spotting discontinuities and for confirming an export looks like a normal map before it reaches your engine.
• Split — art and lit side by side with a divider you can drag, for comparing a region against its source.

The light rig

Press V for the Lights tool. Lights appear as gizmos over the artwork; drag one to move it. Clicking a gizmo also selects that light in the inspector's Lights tab, so its controls are in front of you.

Nothing about the rig is exported. It is a viewing condition, not part of the map, and no change you make to a light can change the normal map. That separation is deliberate: the whole point of a light you can drag is to interrogate a surface you are not simultaneously altering.

Light controls

Select a light in the Lights tab and you get:

• Intensity — how bright it is. Can be switched off to mute a light without deleting it and losing its position.
• Height above sprite — how far the light sits off the surface. This is the control that decides whether the lighting is raking or flat-on, and it is the most informative one to move: a raking light shows up small errors in surface direction that a light straight overhead hides completely.
• Falloff radius — how far its influence reaches.
• Colour, and its Position in sprite pixels, which updates as you drag the gizmo.

Add and remove lights with the controls above the list. The rig is saved in a project — the angle that revealed a problem is part of how you were judging the sprite, and rebuilding it on every open is the sort of small tax that stops people checking. It is not saved in a preset, because positions are in sprite pixels and would be meaningless on a sprite of another size.

How to actually judge a map

• Move the light in a circle. A good surface stays plausible from every direction. A bad one looks fine from the angle the artwork's own shading implies and falls apart from the opposite side, because the painted shading has been baked into the geometry.
• Use a low light. Raking light along the surface exaggerates errors in direction. Overhead light hides them.
• Watch what should be occluded. If a light above an arm also lights the stomach below it, the surface behind the arm is tilted toward the light when it should not be. That is what the In front hint fixes — see Painting hints.
• Check the whole animation, not one frame. Flicker between frames is far more noticeable in motion than any single frame's error. See Frames and animation.