Mblackwell, on 28 February 2012 - 05:24 PM, said:
Best bet if you want hud sprites effected by polymer lights is to build a flat model and have the sprite be its uv. Pain in the ass to move things around though and the light won't be correct (although you could make a good normal for it and it would probably be okay).
There's other crazy things you could do too like detect the nearest light and have a series of definetints/pals (for coloration) and shift the shade around based on the expected brightness.
I'm talking out of my ass now as I'm a bit tired, but hopefully it's helpful anyway.
You know, I once tried something just like that... I wanted to try and see what a phaser rifle would look like as a sprite only, because I had an image of one that looked brilliant (in the 'ready to fire' first person position too), but I wanted the Polymer HUD lighting to work on it. What I did was create a flat plane basic model and with a little DEF tinkering, got it properly rotated for first person view (hard to explain, but I positioned it where the gun WOULD be and rotated it to the right about 30 degrees on the centre axis). Then I just applied the texture of the rifle to it, had a look in-game, warped the perspective of the texture a bit in photoshop, looked again, warped again and so forth until it looked almost completely normal in first person mode... Then with a normal map on, the lighting was almost perfect on it.
Unfortunately it was just too much work for every weapon and every animation, and then the model went kaput randomly one day and I lost all that work (it was a one-off test, no backups) so I just didn't bother and instead fixed my phaser rifle to a really nice full 3d mesh. My point is that with a fair deal of work, time and effort, it can be done and it can look great. I just wish I'd taken some screenshots... But I never felt it was finished
*edit* I just whipped this up in about 1 minute based on what I remember doing last time. You could simplify the model plane drastically but that's not the point. What I did was fire up the phaser rifle model from a Google Sketchup mesh, rotate it roughly how I wanted, took a screenshot, cut out just the rifle and stuck it on a blank canvas in photoshop with a transparent background, saved it as a PNG, then applied it as a texture for the flat plane mesh in Milkshape3D and... voila. It's totally basic but with some further tinkering you can nail it down awesomely. Stick on a normal map and it's great;