Case Study: Dead Cells’ Character Art Pipeline

Dan Moran has recently shared a nice video explaining some of the tricks behind Dead Cells nice 3D/2D blended character art pipeline. The artist’s followers asked him to do a video about sprite/pixel lighting and he decided to explain a strategy for getting normal mapped sprites which might be one of the most efficient tricks. The shader shown in the video can also be useful for those of you working with hand-drawn sprites.

The video also focuses on some of the Tooling/C# code involved. “In reality, we often end up writing a lot more C#/engine code in graphics work than shader code to get everything working the way we want. There isn’t quite as much line-by-line breakdown as usual, so I’ve made sure that the code shipped on GitHub with this episode is well documented,” stated the artist. 

And here are some links:

• Get the shaders
• Support Dan on Patreon 
• Follow him on the Twitter