Not normal map like lighting (like most “lighting sprites” methods), I’m thinking some sprites have lighting others do not. I’m trying to achieve this look, roughly with sprites. Cheap tricks and hacks could also work, like a version 0 would be dark sprites behind light ones with 2 emitters. Ideally it would be better, like take the normal off a cylinder emitter to get the shading (which is a method I’ll explore). I’m open to ideas on how to best achieve it. Thanks!
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Interesting reference! (Do you mind sharing the source of the image? 
)
Getting the clean (not rounded) edges between the light and shadow in the middle part is one of the crucial parts imo. Don’t have a “right” approach but spitballing ideas:
I did something like this a good while back, where I had an animated pillar mesh and projected the normals to the particle sprites. It wasn’t a good implementation, but with modern particle systems it, may even possible to project/sample a lot of different information from that “guiding” mesh and omit the normals.
Another Idea may be to use a “threshold map” like they used in Hi-Fi Rush to control the lighting on characters to avoid normal manipulation. It is mentioned in the GDC talk (at 45:05)
A whole other approach would be to create some volumetric smoke/cloud for it, like in “Sky: Children of Light”
I can imagine that making a sharper ramp with smoothstep can get one closer to the target look. But the downside is, that the movement might be to stiff.
Sadly, I currently have no info on that at hand. I know there was a blog entry of somewhere that did a rough breakdown of the clouds, but I couldn’t find it right now.
I hope these helps to get your thoughts rolling in new direction
If I have a “Eureka!”, I will let you know. Definately interested in what other people have in mind!
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Thanks for the reply! That is helpful. Its not an exciting source, I generated it in MidJourney. I’ll RnD some of these ideas and see what works. Lucky for me the lighting model we build already takes care of the threshold part.