Tools

Looking around

Lights V

Drag a light to move it over the artwork. Clicking a light also selects it in the inspector's Lights tab, so you can adjust its height, brightness and colour.

The rig is a viewing condition, not part of the map. Nothing about your lights is exported, and changing them cannot change the normal map. They exist so you can judge the surface.

Zoom Z

Click to zoom in, Alt-click to zoom out. Ctrl and the scroll wheel does the same thing from any tool, and keeps whatever is under the pointer where it is.

Hand H

Drag to move the artwork around the pane, for when a sprite is larger than the window.

Correcting line detection

The tool finds your line work automatically, by colour. These two are for where it got it wrong.

Add stroke B

Paint over an edge the detection missed, and it will be treated as a drawn line the surface folds along.

Reach for it when a fold you can plainly see in the artwork has no effect on the result. Common causes: the line is drawn in a colour close to what it sits on, or it is soft enough that the detection reads it as shading.

Remove stroke E

Paint over something the detection did find but should ignore.

Reach for it when the result has a crease where the artwork has no fold — most often over painted shading, cross-hatching, or texture detail like scales, where every scale becomes its own little ridge. Painting this over the region flattens it back out.

Describing the surface

Cut outline C

Marks part of the outline as an occluding cut — an edge where the shape simply stops — rather than a surface curving away out of sight.

The distinction is invisible in the artwork and matters a great deal to the result. A rounded pauldron curves away at its edge; a flat blade or a cut-off plank does not, and treating its edge as a curve gives it a rolled lip it should not have.

Paint it on the outline itself, not inside the shape. A stroke that touches no outline pixels changes nothing, and the application will tell you so.

Flatten F

Holds a region facing the camera. For flat plates, panels, shield faces, signage — anything that should read as flat rather than domed.

Filled rather than drawn along, and there is a general Flatten interior slider in the inspector that does the same thing to the whole sprite. Painting a region takes precedence over the slider: a global setting fighting a painted one is how a hint ends up looking as though it did nothing, so the painted answer wins and the panel says so.

Tube axis A

Draw a stroke down the length of a limb and it is read as a cylinder instead of a dome.

Without this, a long thin shape solved from its silhouette tends to round off along its length as well as across it, so an arm looks like a sausage with domed ends rather than a tube. The stroke tells the tool which direction is along the shape.

Its influence extends outward from your stroke as far as Tube axis reach in the inspector, which needs to be at least about half the limb's width to reach the outline on both sides. Too small and the hint does nothing; the application will tell you when the axis never reaches the outline.

In front D

Fill the part of the artwork that overlaps another part — an arm across a body, a tail crossing a leg, a scarf over a chest.

This is the one hint that describes a relationship rather than a feature, and it fixes a problem no silhouette can settle. Where two parts overlap, the shared edge looks exactly like a fold in one continuous surface, so the surface behind tilts to follow it, and light that should be blocked spills onto it instead. Marking the nearer part means its edge stops folding what is behind it, and the surface behind carries on underneath.

Line work within a short distance of the front edge is absorbed into it, so you do not have to erase the arm's own outline separately.

Convex area O

Fill a shape that domes towards you inside a busier surface — a glassy eye, a rivet, the boss of a shield.

The shape's own edge becomes the rim of a surface of its own: edge-on at the rim, facing you in the middle, and creased off from whatever it sits in so the dome does not spread outwards. Nothing about such a shape reaches the sprite's outline, so without this the silhouette says nothing about it and the marks drawn around it read as a fold.

Erase the shape's outline with Remove stroke E first, otherwise the stroke and the rim describe the same edge and the stroke's version is a fold.

Concave area I

The same, dished away from you instead of towards you: a crater, a dent, an eye socket. It is Convex area with the direction reversed, and nothing else differs.

Trust methods T

Fill a region where the detail methods should be allowed to speak. See Solver settings for what those are.

The methods are alternative ways of guessing a surface — following the artwork's shading, or adding a bevelled edge — and they are switched off by default because turning them on across a whole sprite tends to spoil the parts that were already right. This tool is how you aim them: paint the region that nothing else describes well, set a weight, and the methods act there and nowhere else.

With a weight set and nothing painted, the methods apply to the whole sprite, and the inspector says so plainly. That is a usable mode, not a mistake, but it is rarely the one you want.