16 high-fidelity 2.5D fantasy heroes — de-lit, engine-relightable, 8-direction. The HD companion to @sprite-foundry/fantasy-heroes-48: the same party and the same export contract, rebuilt at illustration fidelity for games that light their sprites at runtime (HD-2D / 2.5D).

Why de-lit?

These sprites carry form and material; your engine supplies the light. That is the HD-2D contract (Octopath Traveler, Sea of Stars): a placed light casts real shadows, the normal map turns a flat billboard into volume, the mask's ambient-occlusion deepens the folds and its roughness lets steel catch a highlight the cloth doesn't. The same hero reads correctly at noon, at dusk, and in a torch-lit dungeon — from one pack.

What's Included

16 hero archetypes, each with 8 directional views × 4 map layers at 512×512, foot-anchored (pivot [0.5, 1.0]):

| Variant | Role | Identity cue | |---------|------|--------------| | Fighter | Frontline all-rounder | Grey hair, leather-and-scale armor, sword + round shield | | Ranger | Ranged striker | Hooded green cloak, longbow, quiver | | Mage | Arcane caster | Deep-blue robe, pointed hat, green-gem staff | | Rogue | Flanker | Black hood, dark leather, face-mask, twin daggers | | Cleric | Healer / support | White-and-gold robes, holy mace, sacred emblem | | Barbarian | Heavy damage | Bare chest, red hair, fur kilt, two-handed axe | | Paladin | Elite tank | Blue-and-silver plate, red-cross kite shield | | Monk | Fast specialist | Topknot, sleeveless gi, green sash, bo staff | | Bard | Support / buff | Burgundy doublet, feathered cap, lute | | Druid | Nature magic | Antlered headdress, green-brown robes, vine staff | | Warlock | Dark-pact DPS | Black hooded robe, purple eldritch energy | | Sorcerer | Raw magic DPS | White hair, blue robe, glowing arcane aura | | Artificer | Tech / utility | Leather coat, brass goggles, tool belt, gadget | | Samurai | Melee / discipline | Dark-blue lamellar, kabuto helm, katana | | Knight | Tank / frontline | Steel full plate, red-plumed helm, sword + shield | | White Mage | Healer / holy | Blonde, white-and-gold robes, ornate golden staff |

The four layers

| Layer | What it is | Use it for | |---|---|---| | albedo | de-lit base colour — no baked light, shadow, or AO | the sprite; your engine lights it | | normal | view-space surface normals — OpenGL-style (Y up), blue ≈ toward camera (flip green for DirectX) | real-time directional lighting | | mask | R = ambient occlusion · G = roughness · B = emissive | contact shadows, material sheen, self-glow | | depth | linear camera-distance (white = near) | parallax / tooling (not 2D lighting) |

Every layer is pixel-aligned across the 8 directions; each hero ships a manifest.json (schema_version 2.0.0) with a per-file SHA-256, the pivot, the mask channel map, and per-engine notes.

Install

npm install @sprite-foundry/fantasy-heroes-hd

Folder Structure

assets/
  fighter/
    albedo/    8 directional PNGs (front, front_left, left, back_left, back, back_right, right, front_right)
    normal/    8 matching view-space normal maps
    mask/      8 matching AO/roughness/emissive masks
    depth/     8 matching depth maps
    manifest.json
  ...15 more

Engine Compatibility

Plain PNG + JSON — load them anywhere, then wire the layers into your lighting pipeline:

• Godot 4 — albedo on a Sprite2D, normal via CanvasTexture.normal_texture, a PointLight2D; sample mask.g for specular, mask.r to modulate ambient.
• Unity URP (2D) — albedo → _BaseMap, normal → _NormalMap, mask → _MaskMap (R=AO, G=roughness).
• Phaser / PixiJS / custom — albedo + normal into the 2D lighting pipeline; mask / depth are tooling-side.

manifest.json carries the per-engine notes in engineNotes. No engine-specific format, no runtime dependency.

The -hd line vs the 48 line

fantasy-heroes-48 (retro 48px pixel-art) and fantasy-heroes-hd are parallel tiers, not a breaking upgrade. Same 16 heroes, same direction order, same foot-anchored framing — ship the 48px pack for a pixel game, ship -hd for a high-fidelity 2.5D game. Pick the tier your renderer wants.

Specs

• Variants: 16 hero archetypes
• Tile size: 512 × 512 px
• Directions: 8
• Layers: albedo + normal + mask (AO/roughness/emissive) + depth
• Total sprites: 512 (16 × 8 × 4)
• Format: transparent PNG + manifest.json (schema 2.0.0)
• Pivot: [0.5, 1.0] (foot-anchored)

How it's made (and why it's commercial-clean)

Each hero starts as a fresh high-fidelity concept in a house-trained painterly style (Qwen-Image, Apache-2.0). The 8 directional views are generated without a 3D mesh — Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 (Apache-2.0) rotates the camera around the character while holding identity, so the face and detail survive every angle. Each view is then decomposed into its 2.5D layers by single-image estimators: a de-lit albedo + roughness from Marigold-IID (Apache-2.0 code, OpenRAIL weights — commercial-OK), real surface normals from Marigold-Normals, depth from Depth-Anything-V2-Base (Apache-2.0), a clean alpha matte from BiRefNet (MIT), and ambient occlusion derived from the depth — then packed to the contract above. The original fantasy-heroes-48 silhouette, palette, and signature prop are preserved per hero. Identity stays in the image model — no InsightFace / InstantID / face-adapter weights (which carry non-commercial licenses) touch this pack. Every component is Apache-2.0 / MIT / commercial-OpenRAIL; the assets are yours to ship.

Security

This package contains only static PNG images and JSON metadata — no executable code, no install hooks, no network access, no telemetry. See SECURITY.md.

License

MIT — use in commercial and non-commercial projects.

Credits

Built by MCP Tool Shop with the Sprite Foundry no-mesh 2.5D pipeline (Qwen-Image + Qwen-Image-Edit + Marigold + Depth-Anything-V2).