Automatic Sprite Shading

Sprites have been present since the first arcade games and console generations. Despite the advances in computer graphics and the whole representation of virtual worlds on 3D environments, 2D-based games still have their market, specially on portable consoles and mobile devices. The visual quality of today´s games have increased as a result of hardware improvements in processing power, memory, and a richer color gamut. However, most of the editing task is still manual, using graphics editing tools. We present a method to automatically generate shading distribution on sprites, one important step during the editing process that is time demanding for most manual works on art design today. Our method allows to control the position of a local light source and to generate an approximation of the shading distribution effect. Although our solution is not physically accurate, according to the shape of the represented object, it can produce well usable results for 2D game systems in many practical cases, when compared with handmade sprite shading.