NORMAL VECTOR PALETTE

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I'm putting this picture up here in case anyone wants to do this themselves by hand using this palette I made. It's kind of fun.

I made the actual textures in a few moments just so I'd have some samples to test my HLSL shader and levels with, but the point is with how I hand-drew the normals in.

There's some angles I haven't added to the above palette yet (which would add a normal depth that might be more than you actually need) but this is how I can easily do it. I actually hand-calculated the X, Y, and Z parts of each vector such that it was really normalized (length is as close to 1 as I wanted). The center square is facing directly at you.

The square above it is halfway in between 0 and 45 degrees tilted up, the one below it is tilted down, and so on. Two squares up, down, left and right of the center is 45 degrees, and the ones further than that are tilted even more. This palette was annoying to make since I kept making mathematical mistakes. If your vectors aren't normalized, you'll get much too bright or too dark results on the edges.

I can then have this to draw colors from when I draw the normals on top of the original pixel art. Normal maps should ONLY be used for surfaces that pop out enough to make a clear difference (like bricks and especially emblems). You shouldn't probably do this for grass and fine dirt (but doing this on sand dunes would make for some really sexy sand textures).

In 2D games, you would normal map tiles which make up textured floors, walls, etc. In fact, you'll do this more often since you're creating this isometric illusion of a 3D map constantly with tiles. If only VX was made with a C/C++ DirectX Plugin interface, I would actually spend the time to make a normal mapper for everyone.

Final note, the 4th channel, or alpha in the normal map (not the texture map) would make a surface more flat and shiny (as applied to every smooth, flat pixel to the bricks, and halfway applied to the corners). This could also be any kind of other mask you wanted, like chrome, glowing, or whatever you felt the texture could use in addition to being normal mapped.


PS:
All these purple lit test maps I keep making with the patterns and bricks reminds me of Hydrocity from Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Well, take a look at the examples. The cavity spots in the chunk of ruined brick texture are supposed to be inward. I drew the sides in on the normal map to the right so when light hits it, the cavity spots get lit like that giving it depth.