(**) The Palette Options

[Aztek985]

Originally posted by denmon0728:

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This is the beginning of a couple of Tiberian sun Infantry shp tutorials that i will be writing on my spare time. And the first thing that you need to know about when editing TS infantry shps is the colour palette.

Intruduction
Tiberian sun Infantry shps, along with buildings and voxels, uses the unittem and unitsno palettes. The unittem palette is the palette used on temperat maps and the unitsno is the palette used on snow maps. These palletes are almost identical. Below is an example of each palette.


The colours
The top left black colour is the background colour and it wont be shown in-game. The colour below it is the shadow colour and it will be shown as fading black behind the infantry, dont paint this on the frames that the infantry is on, but paint it on the blank frames after the infantrys frames.

The red colours in the bottom left are the remap colours. They change to the team colour ingame.

The grey colours to the right of the remap colours are the greyscale colours. Use these to paint on the infantry if you want to make him grey.
All other greys can be used for lightning the infantry up when he shoots.

The brick colours at the top right of the greyscale are used for painting human skin.

The four red's to the right of the green colours are non-remappable red's. They can be used for blood etc.

The red's and yellows at the bottom right can be used to create normal fire effects when an infantry fires his gun.

I think that ive gone through the most important colours of the palette now. If you think that i missed something then please say so in a replie.

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

The red's and yellows at the bottom right can be used to create normal fire effects when an infantry fires his gun.

These are also the only colors that aren't affected by different lighting settings on a map. So the 16 colors from the pure white color (index 240) to the bottom pure white are all good for lamps and position light effects, especially on dark maps.

left uses normal colors, right uses the 16 colors on the bottom right side of the palette. Both have nearly the same color in shp-builder.

This post has been edited by Lin Kuei Ominae: Nov 7 2007, 04:19 PM

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

some more infos about the palette.

SHPs

This is the palette how it looks ingame used from an infantry unit on a
bright map: dark map: snow map:
You have the same result for SHP units without a turret like the wolverine.

Now the palette for SHP units with a turret.

as you can see it cuts the image and only a 160x160 pixel big part is shown. This you can also read here: SHP units size restriction.

with a fitting/resized palette you have the following result on a
bright map: dark map: snow map:
You can see that some of the colors (the theater and glowing ones) are green. Those should be avoided when creating shp units with turrets.

Finally the palette used by buildings on a
bright map: dark map:
this is again like infantry or SHP-units without a turret. Snow map not done but obviously the same like infantry on a snow map.

If you want to test this yourself, here the test shps:  tests.zip ( 1.63K ) Number of downloads: 467


The final result is, that only SHP units with turrets make problems and use the palette in a different way. These are also the only units that can't be bigger than 160x160 pixel. Infantry, Vehicle SHPs without a turret and buildings don't make/have these problems.

Voxel

The Voxel Palette also has some restrictions.
Temperate: Snow:
You can see that also here several colors change into purple. Those should be avoided when creating a voxel

This post has been edited by Lin Kuei Ominae: May 3 2010, 08:57 AM

[Team Black]

very helpful info here LKO, thanks for posting this!

[Machine]

I'm really happy with the result of the Greendots Disease topic on PPM , as I was thinking it was my fault (a corrupted palette or something like that, and not the game itself). And in the end we learned something new , thanks LKO you're a great help.

[IcySon55]

Here they are people, based on Lin's findings, palettes made for turreted shp vehicles:

3D 2 SHPers Palettes (TS Only)

DO NOT use these in the game. They are intended for use with SHP conversion only.

[Bittah Commander]

I just discovered exactly why many colors turn green for turreted SHP units.
This is because any color that exists more than once on the temperat.pal palette, will be duplicated on the unittem.pal/unitsno.pal palette as well.

Just compare LKO's palette images for turreted SHP units


with temperat.pal.


As you can see, exactly the colors that are pink on the temperat.pal palette turn green for turreted SHP units.
So to solve this problem, you just have to replace all pink colors with other unique colors.