Palettes, The Final Frontier!
Yes! It's fixed! Well, it was never fixed, but now it's slightly better than not fixed yet... Er, scratch that. Anyway, it was my fault, and I probably shouldn't go around playing with html. I keep breaking it. So. While the site was dead, for about a week, some of us got together to sort out palettes. And now, the paletting system is looking a lot easier to implement.
The Call
One night, one of the team's developers called me and we talked for a solid 4 hours about how palettes would be implemented. How they would work, and look. This resulted in trying new ideas. We had to find a way to cleanly separate all the colours of the pony, which can be hard with finding the right colour tolerance. This would change for each colour on the sprite, and we were going for an efficient method here, We have over 1,000 individual frames, these need to be edited individually for each character? This would just be mind-bendingly taxing on my patience, and probably the whole team's.
Eureka Moments
What we managed to discover is that we needed to make fully aliased sprites. This was the only way. It sure was the easiest, but I could not rest letting these into the game.
Minty
I brought up the problem with our affiliate, Creativity Kitchen, they help us with this sort of stuff. This was mainly a Flash problem, and this is what they specialize in.
The problem we had was that we needed a way to export the individual colours of the pony, from the original Flash vector, but the rig we used, this was, and is practically impossible. One of the members told me that it could technically be done. Just not in Flash. I was told it could be done in Adobe After Effects. I was confused for a bit, and so I contacted Minty. Minty showed me how it could be done, and I was so excited about this method that I even posted it to twitter. After some intense thought processes, I found yet another method that could be used. I was looking at TFH's reindeer picture and was baffled at how they did it using a flash rig that was similarly constructed. Albeit, a bit less depthy, as our rigs were animation ready rigs made for a 24FPS TV show, TFH rigs are made for an epic fast-paced fighting game, We've repurposed out rigs they've built theirs soecifically for a fighting game. Beside the point,
It's Black Magic!
I thought, "How could they get pure lineart without having intersecting lineart from the lower covered layers? For example; her neck." While I was looking at the Doe, the solution hit me like a train. We can just make the fill colour white and the lineart a true colour, I.E. Red. If we make the lineart true RGB Red, and then the only other colour as white, we can set the tolerance to 100% as there is no white in red.
"I'm on a roll"
This allowed for semi anti-aliased sprites, which pleased me allot. I also figured out a method for doing gradients. This involved lowering the saturation to make a greyscale gradient, then we could overlay a colour and adjust the opacity this say, opactiy would become the hue, and we'd just change the colour of the overlay accordingly. So this way we could have nice looking palettes, and awesome HD gradients.
Palettes, The Final Frontier!
After this gruesome process, Our developer pointed out this method opens the door to many other possibilities, such as, custom palettes. Yes, we can offer players a way to create and save their own palettes. Currently this is only possible in the engine, as we still need a decent way to make this work. By making it work, we don't want to shove this at players.
The Call
One night, one of the team's developers called me and we talked for a solid 4 hours about how palettes would be implemented. How they would work, and look. This resulted in trying new ideas. We had to find a way to cleanly separate all the colours of the pony, which can be hard with finding the right colour tolerance. This would change for each colour on the sprite, and we were going for an efficient method here, We have over 1,000 individual frames, these need to be edited individually for each character? This would just be mind-bendingly taxing on my patience, and probably the whole team's.
Eureka Moments
What we managed to discover is that we needed to make fully aliased sprites. This was the only way. It sure was the easiest, but I could not rest letting these into the game.
I set out to find a cleaner looking way of removing the separate colours. This is where my friend, Minty come's in...
Minty
I brought up the problem with our affiliate, Creativity Kitchen, they help us with this sort of stuff. This was mainly a Flash problem, and this is what they specialize in.
The problem we had was that we needed a way to export the individual colours of the pony, from the original Flash vector, but the rig we used, this was, and is practically impossible. One of the members told me that it could technically be done. Just not in Flash. I was told it could be done in Adobe After Effects. I was confused for a bit, and so I contacted Minty. Minty showed me how it could be done, and I was so excited about this method that I even posted it to twitter. After some intense thought processes, I found yet another method that could be used. I was looking at TFH's reindeer picture and was baffled at how they did it using a flash rig that was similarly constructed. Albeit, a bit less depthy, as our rigs were animation ready rigs made for a 24FPS TV show, TFH rigs are made for an epic fast-paced fighting game, We've repurposed out rigs they've built theirs soecifically for a fighting game. Beside the point,
It's Black Magic!
I thought, "How could they get pure lineart without having intersecting lineart from the lower covered layers? For example; her neck." While I was looking at the Doe, the solution hit me like a train. We can just make the fill colour white and the lineart a true colour, I.E. Red. If we make the lineart true RGB Red, and then the only other colour as white, we can set the tolerance to 100% as there is no white in red.
"I'm on a roll"
This allowed for semi anti-aliased sprites, which pleased me allot. I also figured out a method for doing gradients. This involved lowering the saturation to make a greyscale gradient, then we could overlay a colour and adjust the opacity this say, opactiy would become the hue, and we'd just change the colour of the overlay accordingly. So this way we could have nice looking palettes, and awesome HD gradients.
Palettes, The Final Frontier!
After this gruesome process, Our developer pointed out this method opens the door to many other possibilities, such as, custom palettes. Yes, we can offer players a way to create and save their own palettes. Currently this is only possible in the engine, as we still need a decent way to make this work. By making it work, we don't want to shove this at players.
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| "select color for flipbook - RBD_O-L" |
We'd want to have a more, user friendly method. Which means more programming work, but it does mean I can do this!
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