Lets talk about palette swaps!

[throttlekitty]

Bethesda has a pretty nice option for recoloring now: Palette textures, aka Gradient maps or Lookup tables.

 

The concept is simple here, the base color map is done in grayscale (usually), and the Palette texture modifies the colors. This works exactly like the Gradient Map adjustment in Photoshop. The .bgsm files have a "Grayscale to Palette Scale" number that offsets which gradient to use. So if you want 10 different colors of the same shirt, this is really easy to do. Plus it shaves down filesizes and memory use bigtime; If you were going to just hue adjust anyway, there's no need for a whole new texture now. (the only downside is that we may need a tool to merge these for end users if we end up with multiple mods recoloring the 10mm pistol this way, for example, but that's minor)

 

However, I keep getting confused by this, because some of the maps are straight horizontal bars like 10mm pistol and the baseball bat. And then I get to bricks.

 

http://i.imgur.com/WyIAubo.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/fCujbBT.jpg

 

Here's the greyscale for the bricks, which is actually kind of purple but that doesn't matter, just the dark/light values. And the LUT is blown up here. There are numerous brick recolors in Materials\Architecture\Buildings\Brick*.bgsm, but I don't quite see how one gets "red" out of these, except the lower two if you only use the bottom pixel row.

 

Definitely needs a bit more poking around, but I wanted to get some word out about the basic idea here. Hopefully we can see a bit more easy customization to weapons without totally bloating things up, eh?

[ChaosWWW]

Ah okay, that's what those are for, I noticed those in the texture files. I figured they had a system like this when I noticed several areas in game that seemed to be using a tinting system, most obviously in the subways where each subway had a different color. Figured it would be smarter for them to use a recoloring system rather than having a new texture for each color.

 

I can't really figure out how the heck these color gradient things actually work to be honest. Just seems like lots of random gradients, I dunno how they would actually be applied to a shader. I understand how they could work, but just they way the textures are laid out seems really strange. To add to the weirdness, a lot of stuff I thought would use this tinting system seem not to, like the aforementioned subway tiles.

 

To your point about customizable weapons, seems like something similar to that might already be in place with some of Bethesda's assets? Check out "PA_palette_d.DDS" in the power armor folder for example. Might be used for tinting to some extent, but it seems like most if not all of the recolors are actually separate textures. It seems like very few things that would logically use this tinting system actually use it.

Edited December 7, 2015 by ChaosWWW

[throttlekitty]

 

 

It seems like very few things that would logically use this tinting system actually use it.

 

preach! I actually had trouble picking out a good example while I was making this post because of the strange inconsistencies. It's definitely a good feature, it's just odd in many places.

 

 

In speaking elsewhere, it was suggested they might animate within each block. Or possibly that it can react a little different to different light/image spaces. I also forgot that DDS uses 4x4 compression, so you'd want each strip at least that tall without distorting the colors from other blocks.