Texture Question

freetoplay

Is it possible to change the color of a texture image, by changing the material color? Or would I have to completely swap a texture image that has a different color? For example: I have a hat mesh with a colored image for the texture. One way to change the color of this hat is to swap it with a texture image of another color, but I am wondering if I can just keep the texture image, while changing the color by changing the material color?

CrackRockSteady

That should be possible but I guess it depends what software you're using.  Game engines usually have some way to adjust Hue/Saturation/brightness through the material.  I'm assuming that is also possible to do through materials in 3ds Max or Maya but I'm not certain.

SeveredScion

It is possible if the shader you are using is set up to allow it. Varies per software.

Examples:
Maya - diffuse texture automatically overrides diffuse color value.
3ds Max - diffuse texture automatically overrides diffuse color value, but there is also a map % parameter for every texture channel available by default, so you can set bright red diffuse color, add a diffuse map, and turn the map down to 50%, and it will then be mixed with red.
Unity - albedo texture map automatically gets multiplied by albedo color. So if the albedo color is anything other than 255-white, it will darken the albedo texture map. If albedo color has saturation anything about 0%, it will tint the albedo texture map.

Disclaimer - I've mostly been working in 3ds Max lately. I'm describing describing default behaviors of all these softwares but maybe the defaults have changed in recent versions of Maya or Unity. 

Addendum - "multiply" in the Unity examples works like "multiply" layer blending mode in Photoshop, which is pretty standard in graphics. RGB values are treated as decimals, with 1 being 100% of that RGB value, or 255. So anything not at 100% brightness value will darken what it's being multiplied with, since it's multiplying by a number between 0 and 1.

uncle808us

In my 3D software Cheetah 3D you can do this with the mix setting.

Alex_J

Check out the polycount wiki and read up on shaders and textures. I suspect you are confusing some terms -- very understandable because the meaning of the technical terms isn't exactly the same as their ordinary usage. Looks like your question is already answered, but I'll add just for reiteration : yes, absolutely you can change the color of your model by using the material/shader. Many programs have a standard shader that allows you to change the tint. But you can actually create shaders that can allow you to do pretty much an infinite variety of things. 

To get a great crash course in creating shaders without having to get deep into any coding, check out Unreal Engine basic material creation tutorials on youtube. Unreal uses a very easy to understand node graph that will help you wrap your head around how shaders and textures work in a fun and intuitive way.

Eric Chadwick

To give you an idea of what's possible with tinting, here's a project I did with extreme tinting in Unity. All the textures are greyscale, all the color is done with custom shaders.
https://polycount.com/discussion/160691/sketchbook-eric-chadwick/p1

Here's another example of extreme tinting, made by Snefer in Unreal
https://polycount.com/discussion/89682/an-exercise-in-modular-textures-scifi-lab-udk/p1