Here is a free application for making material shaders. It has a normal map function.

neotextureedit.sourceforge.net

Add a bitmap block, load your texture, then add a normal map block and wire them together.

How it works? Usually you use a grey scale image, non-color image. White is the mountains, or bumps, and black is the holes or valleys.

You have a color image so it will do it by luminance, The brighter, or closer to white colors will make the hills or bumps, and the dark, or colors near black will be the holes or valleys.

When I am making a 3d character, I use the normal maps to draw small details like scales or scars.

Normal maps can be used for making simple bump shaders, and complex parallax shaders with shadows 8)

It is a great thing to learn about. You will use it a lot in game making, especially if you use a 3D game engine.

EDIT:

Your favorite painting application may have a plugin or a filter for normal maps... give google a shot.

I know they exist for GIMP, Photoshop, DogWAffle, and Paint Shop Pro.

You might try the job board at BlenderArtists.com too, there are lots of students that would love to take up a paying job there.

Very cool, Road rash was one of my all time favorites! Cant wait to makes something like this 8)

For explosions like that you may want to have a look at the Particles plugin.

Set it to one shot and spawn one where you want on the screen, it should be pretty much what you're after.

Excellent! Thank you. I saw the particles before but did not notice the in-depth controls. I think I only played with them for the first day.

Going to go look at the manual, as see what I have been missing. I have done some fun effects in ID tech 3 and 4, and Unreal 2004,UDK. Looking forward to playing with C2's tonight!

Thanks for the help 8)

That looks Great! thank you procrastinator!

Is it possible to draw single pixels with C2? (or with HTML5 canvas in general?)

I am doing some really small explosion special effect. I was wondering if there is a more efficient way of drawing just a single point on the screen than using a 1x1 textured sprite plane?

Explosions are a small 16x16 tile, I just want a few little sparks to fly out, and then alpha fade into nothingness.

If not I am cool with making a 1x1 texture. Years of 3d modeling and UV mapping has prepared me for such a monumental task.

<img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

jojoe, there can be bulk prices for educational institutions, so perhaps something could be considered from here.

Send an email to licensehelpkbh@scirra.com to discuss it/have more informations.

Awesome!

When i do send the E-mail, there might be some thank you notes attached to it ;)

EDIT: sorry for the double post.

I noticed that GameMaker went on sale over the Christmas period on Steam. If I was an existing GameMaker customer that would have really annoyed me, to the point of migrating to other software.

I think a static price point is the best way to set expectations and not frustrate existing users.

jojoe great work getting animation students interested though. I nearly took the animation route, but much prefer devving games now :)

Hi thehen,

Yeah, I am regretting my choice a little bit now, but thanks to C2 and Unity I am making up for lost time. Hopefully I can put together a small indie studio in the next few months and get some games out on the market.

It is really nice to be able to call the shots. I thank C2, and Unity for this. Now I do not have to make other peoples dreams, I can make my own come true.

I have a friend helping me out with PHP and Java so hopefully in a few weeks there will be a new multiplayer game on the market.

With any luck by next year I can call myself a full time game developer.

(Heck, I am shooting for under 3 months thanks to C2!)

anyway, I must agree, with your opinion of the static price. I was thrilled to see it as low as $130 USD.

I feel funny even asking this. C2 is the best purchase I have made in the last few years, and is worth every cent.

Some of my animation students are looking over my shoulder at my game making ventures. A couple of them have expressed that they would like to buy the full package but as kids, they don't really have the money.

Does Construct ever go on sale, or have some sort of discounts?

I was also wondering if there is a bulk discount? Maybe I can get the kids who are interested to pool their resources.

And lastly, Do I get any sort of perks for leading people to buy C2? (maybe forum badge, discounts of future purchases, an autographed picture of the developers?). Just asking out of curiosity, I do not expect anything, I am happy to help.

Once again, I would like to state how happy I am with my purchase. If I had to buy it again at $500 I would still be happy. The current price is beyond being reasonable, I would expect to pay $300+ for a package like this.

Also thanks for making the free version, the kids are having a lot of fun, without any instruction to speak of. I am quite sure at least 2 of them are going to be buying, or have bought this package already.

Thanks,

Hello all!

First off, You do not need to have prior knowledge of blender to use this utility. (Yay! :) ) If you can save and load files from an application, you can use this :) .

This is a nice little template for blender that will let you see your textures tiled in a 3x3 grid, and let you paint anywhere on the grid in real time.

First off you will need Blender:

blender.org/download/get-blender

Install blender first, then download this file:

warlocks-reign.com/downloads/SeamlessPainterForBlender/SeamlessPainter.blend

If you have blender installed , your browser will automatically offer to open it for you, or you can just save it to disk (recommended).

After you open up the file, you should see this:

<img src="http://warlocks-reign.com/downloads/SeamlessPainterForBlender/seamlessTUTORIAL.png" border="0" />

Use replace image, when loading your custom images... Load image will not load it into the proper material block.

This should be really useful for fixing bad seams in seamless textures,

and for creating new ones from scratch!

Old time blender users, please make sure you have the most recent version installed to ensure a bug free experience :) .

JohnnySheffield should be one click export with an automatically wrapped EXE and Mac OS X .app!

Yay! Awesome!

I knew I made a good buy when I grabbed my licence.

Thanks Ashley!

hey this is cool, I requested this very thing 2 days ago, glad to see it already exists!