[blikant]

In Photoshop, I'm working on a texture sheet for a game character.

This character is designed so you can specify the pants, top, hair and skin colour through rgb sliders on the cahracter selection interface.

To do this - as an indexed colour image, within the colour table the pants colour range must occupy slots 0-51 , the top 52-102 etc etc as this allows the slider on the interface to effect the correct area of the image.

For this method to work I need to know - when working with indexed colour is there a way to break up and specify the placement of colours within set ranges in the colour table?

thanks
a

[Rychan]

Why can't you have seperate textures for pants, top, hair, and skin?

[blikant]

trying to avoid that for frame rate reasons

will another package allow me to do this?

[Bilbo]

would this be a possible solution? - create one greyscale map containing shading/detail information for your map, and multiply it on top of flat colors to create a shaded map. Very easy on the memory because you only have one actual texture , and the computation only happens once, after the color is selected by the user. Textures created manually will always look better though.

[blikant]

yep- have a grey scale map, and need to be able to make multiple rbg sliders effect the one image.

have 2 ways forward, manually constructing indexed colour table or seeing if debabilizer can help!

any ideas as to how debabilizer would cope with this issue?

[YVerloc]

Blikant,

Sounds to me like you might be approaching the problem from an awkward direction? Lets assume that you have solved the problem you are asking about, and you now have a palettized texture image, where specific areas of the palette now map to specific areas of the image. Now what? changing the color of the pants, for example, is still non-trivial.

A better way might be to use masks to define the areas of the image that are to be 'colorable'. The color that is set by the user is blended into the source image using this mask and a simple blending mode, like 'colorize' or 'multiply'. The new image is generated, and exported from the front end into the game engine. You're talking about a game, right?

Hope I'm not way off base. I'm basing my reply on pretty limited information. But from what I understand of your problem, I'd say that using masks and blending modes to colorize specific areas of an image interactively is probably a simpler solution than trying to a) paletize the image in an area-specific way and b) generate new palettes that will allow specific areas to be recolored from interface sliders.

However, if you are still absolutely adamant that you need to assign specific sections of the palette to specific areas of an image, I may be able to help you with that too. WARNING: pseudo technical gibberish retrieved from long term memory follows. I am not liable for death or injury that may result from any use of the following "information":

Back in the early nineties I used to use a 2d animation package caled "animator pro". 8 bit color only. If I remember correctly, you could paste an image selection from one frame of the animation to another. Since each frame had it's own 8-bit palette (a subset of a larger 24 bit uber palette), pasting from one frame to another had the effect of merging the palettes. You could also crunch any frames palette as small as you wanted. SO, in theory you could paint different parts of an image on different frames of an animation and crunch the palettes down so they'd all fit into a single 8 bit palette. Then pasting the image parts into a single 'master frame' should stack the palette sections in such a way that you could track which parts of the palette match which parts of the image.

So if you can live with an 8 bit palette for the whole image, this trick might work. If the whole image needs a deeper palette, then you'r S.O.L, unless you discover that a similar trick works in a more modern app like AfterEffects or somesuch. Animator Pro is truly an ancient app. I think it was written in the late eighties. Runs in DOS only. To get it to run under a modern OS, you'll need to write a short little .BAT file to run it with. Might be able to help you with this if you'r crazy enough to give it a try.

Sorry for the long blather folks.

cheers
YV

[Frost]

blikant:

I think it's pretty easy to do, though photoshop may not be the best tool for this.

I suggest you create your palette with each section you need (haid, shirt, pants) with gradients (from dark to light, or vice-versa) of different colors, say, red(hair), green(shirt) blue(pants). Then paint in RGB Mode using those red green or blue colors of different intensities, then palletize it to that color table made earlier using no dithering. Of course, you can always paint in palettized mode as well. It's fairly easy to do. Other programs like Debabelizer Pro and such have decent pallettized painting options, ...

Palettized stuff is fun to do on platforms that use palettized bitmaps natively, and you could do a lot of cool dynamic effects with it (passing under lights, fake shadowing, etc)... but keep in mind that palettized textures on 3d hardware adds a bit of overhead, and are _slower_ to use than RGB textures, as it needs to do palette conversions... it's especially slow when you have to change any colors in your color palette during the rendering of a frame, or worst case when you change color tables for all the time for every texture. Platforms like Gameboy, etc I don't think are affected by this in the least. New 3d hardware is.