Helping with Textures

theraineydaze · Post by **theraineydaze** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:08 am

You are a miracle worker! I'm gonna get to work!

Thanks man!

theraineydaze · Post by **theraineydaze** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:28 am

Year One Glottis is coming together nicely. Still have some things to change like the color of the black of this mouth and I still need to make his mouth transparent. I'll apply the changes to glottis eye's and hair that Johnny made because I agree with them both. Let me know if you see anymore issues!

http://i.imgur.com/NzWzQF5.jpg

Edit: There's something funky with his shoes. I'll see if I messed up dimensions.

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 12:21 pm

Sweet. No idea about the shoes, though. I think Manny might have some issues with them, too, but they're so small you can barely see them anyway. Hmm :-/

Still looking for a way to force a particular colour from a palette, too. It MUST be possible -- although maybe that particular aspect will have to be done in some other photo editing software.

Also, I forgot that I'd started Glottis. I came across these files yesterday. I never got very far with him, only his jumpsuit butt, but here it is.

Here's the original:

Here's my version (converted to 256 colours with Glottis.act):

I never quite finished it, but it's not bad where it is at the moment.

Here's the PSD of my version:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/304 ... _butt0.psd

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 12:30 pm

Also, I made this as a card replacement.

Simple stuff, but I remember struggling with the transparency issue. As I said in my last post, I'm beginning to wonder if the functionality we need might be available elsewhere, like Gimp or something. I'm 99% sure you used to able to do it in PSP -- I'll download the trial and see if you still can.

Here's the PSD for the card, if anyone wants to experiment with the transparency issue:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30449117/card.psd

Nitrus · Post by **Nitrus** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 12:53 pm

theraineydaze wrote:Year One Glottis is coming together nicely. Still have some things to change like the color of the black of this mouth and I still need to make his mouth transparent. I'll apply the changes to glottis eye's and hair that Johnny made because I agree with them both. Let me know if you see anymore issues!

http://i.imgur.com/NzWzQF5.jpg

Edit: There's something funky with his shoes. I'll see if I messed up dimensions.

Wow, that had come out better than I'd hoped, it's got a comic style / pop art kind of look to it, I like it.

As for the shoes, two things might be going on:
Either texture isn't scaled up 4x size, or the models' UVs. I'm gonna take a look at it later.

Also JohnnyWalker2001, what are you trying to achieve with the transparency exactly, and the palette color picking...?
My brain is kinda slow at the moment, so I'm failing to understand

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 1:34 pm

So far the look is very Zelda Wind Waker to me -- I'm hoping raineydaze is just experimenting for now. If you look at the close-ups they were going for the look that everything was painted.

I wrote about it a little here:
http://grimfandangodeluxe.blogspot.co.u ... angos.html

Anyways, let's see what Michael comes up with!

With regards to the colour palette, the problem is that we need to assign a colour from the palette, not just a colour value.

In an Indexed colour file there are a limited number of colours (GIFs, PNG-8). In a Direct colour file, you have an unlimited number (JPGs, PNG-24). With Grim Fandango, each texture is Indexed with an assigned palette of 256 colours.

As we understand it, Color #0 in the 256 colour palette is used for transparency. The colour used is actually not important. The important thing is that the pixel is assigned Color #0.

If Color #0 in the palette is changed from black to bright pink, then the pixels in the file assigned to that colour will change to bright pink. It's a very old skool way of working.

As the moment we can't find a way to telling Photoshop to not simply use "black", but to use Color #0. It should be possible somehow, but even though I use Photoshop in my job every day (and have done for the past decade), it's not a feature I have used before -- it's very seldom needed in this day and age -- and so I'm wondering if, along with things like support for alpha transparency in PNG-8 files, Photoshop just doesn't bother with it. Hmm.

Nitrus · Post by **Nitrus** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 2:10 pm

Yes, I'm eager to hear from Michael too

About the look, that's just a personal preference of mine, something I like, but probably not suitable to the noir setting that Grim Fandango has. When I think GF I think Casablanca, I think of all those detective flicks beginning in a PI's office and somber narrator's voice

And as for the palettes, I think I see what you mean, instead of telling it "Use #000000", we need a way of telling it "Use palette color #1"?

If that's the case, perhaps you can open the "Swatches" window, and from it's menu choose "Replace swatches...", then choose *.ACT in the file type dropdown menu, and choose an exported palette.

Then choose colors from swatches with the color picker.

Not sure if this is what you were going for though...

P.S.: I've read that article a long time ago.

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 5:16 pm

Hmm. I'm pretty sure the Swatches are just that: Swatches of colour. They're not tied to the document in any way

I just tried, and I couldn't see any connection that indicated I was selecting Color #0 and not just 0,0,0 from the Swatch.

Nitrus · Post by **Nitrus** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 5:30 pm

JohnnyWalker2001 wrote:Hmm. I'm pretty sure the Swatches are just that: Swatches of colour.

Yeah, that they are. Could you explain to me in what way would you select a palette slot?

Because if e.g. first you select a slot, and then you decide to use a different colour from say, the colour wheel, one that doesn't exist in the palette, what would it's behaviour be in that case?

And then, if you choose a colour from the wheel which does exist in the palette, it wouldn't be able to tell you in which slot it resides, because there might be multiple slots with the same colour.

I can only think of something like: You click on a color on the palette, and somewhere it says "You are using slot #255", and then it wouldn't change until you click on another slot in the palette. (Or maybe say something like "You are not using any slots" if you chose a colour by different means than selecting it from the palette).

EDIT:
Ahh nope, rereading this finally made it clear to me.

JohnnyWalker2001 wrote:If Color #0 in the palette is changed from black to bright pink, then the pixels in the file assigned to that colour will change to bright pink. It's a very old skool way of working.

Downfall is, if you change a color in the palette, it changes for all the images using that palette...

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 5:57 pm

Nitrus wrote:Yeah, that they are. Could you explain to me in what way would you select a palette slot?

This is the problem. Modern Photoshop doesn't seem to have the palette selecting capabilities of old fashioned graphic editing programs.

Edit: I see you get it now.

The job we want to do would have been standard in all graphic editing software around the time of GF's production. Late 90's Paintshop Pro, or even earlier, Deluxe Paint, would have had no problem allowing us to assign "palette slots" -- as that's largely how they worked. Before the advent of 16-bit+ colour, it's how all graphic editing was done.

Unfortunately we're apparently being hamstrung by modern editing software losing capabilities which aren't used very often any more -- or which may seem undesirable today. It'd be extremely rare that you'd deliberately want to limit yourself to only the exact palette available to you, and not let Photoshop help you out.

ezekiel000 · Post by **ezekiel000** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 8:37 pm

You can get the palette stuff you want in GIMP once you set the image mode to indexed. I had to do similar stuff to what you want when I was working on an AGS game.

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 8:44 pm

Ezekiel000 wrote:You can get the palette stuff you want in GIMP once you set the image mode to indexed. I had to do similar stuff to what you want when I was working on an AGS game.

Ah! Thanks for the heads up!

theraineydaze · Post by **theraineydaze** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:24 pm

I'm glad that your liking the progress. I totally agree with the Wind Waker comment. I think my personal art style kinda leaked in so I'm going to do some tests to try to get that painted feel in. And with the transparency I just need to add the pink in because right now when Glottis opens his mouth its a solid black.

JohnnyWalker2001 · Post by **JohnnyWalker2001** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:46 pm

theraineydaze wrote:I'm glad that your liking the progress. I totally agree with the Wind Waker comment. I think my personal art style kinda leaked in so I'm going to do some tests to try to get that painted feel in. And with the transparency I just need to add the pink in because right now when Glottis opens his mouth its a solid black.

Great to hear! I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I hope GIMP offers a solution to the transparency issue. It'd be great to solve that once for all.

theraineydaze · Post by **theraineydaze** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:08 pm

I figured it out!

http://i.imgur.com/0Ybbel0.jpg

It's really odd. Everything that you want to show up as black should be #010101 and it looks 100% black. But everything that you want transparent should be #000000. So with Glottis mouth I have a thin circle of 010101 with a center of 000000 so you see his black edges filled with clear.

Edit: So theoretically when you index these and apply the ACT they should work. I'm not sure where the CMP was so I couldn't test it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yzrdr6wr1g2jd ... 20hole.bmp

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6cz2d09txzo1l65/card.bmp