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, Lambert shading and the light rig. 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.

• Height, AO, Spec — the extra maps as greyscale, the same way Normal shows the purple picture. Height is integrated from the normals, AO from that height, spec from the artwork's brightness. None of them changes the solve.

• Split — the normal map on the left and the lit result on the right, each the whole sprite at the same zoom and scroll, so a stroke painted on one has its result directly across from it on the other. Zooming or scrolling either pane moves both. Hint tints show on the normal map only. The lights' handles are always on the lit pane, so a light can be dragged there without changing tool, and a press anywhere else does what the tool does. New in 1.6.0.

  Drag the line between the panes to give one more room than the other. The narrower pane shrinks its picture to match, so it shows the same view as the wider one, scaled down; zoom and scroll stay linked, and Fit fits the wider pane. Double-click the line to make the panes equal again. The editor remembers where you left it. New in 1.7.0; the narrower pane scales its picture since 1.8.0.

Apply extra maps in Lit is a checkbox next to those, off by default. It multiplies the lit view by the AO map and adds a simple specular highlight from the spec map. Useful for a last look at what an engine might do with the set. It is not the judgement view: a surface that only looks right once AO and spec are folded in is a surface you have not finished.

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, and its controls are in the inspector's Lights tab. The inspector does not switch tabs for it. While you drag, the preview lights the part of the sprite that is on screen, so a zoomed-in corner of a large document stays sharp. Zoomed out, a huge sprite may still draft at a lower resolution until you let go.

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.