How to achieve a limited color palette art style?
polycounter lvl 9
I'm trying to achieve a kind of over-exposed style with "crushed" colors for a more retro horror feeling, and would appreciate some pointers. I'm looking to create a similar texturing style as can be seen in Paratopic , kind of old-school look with a limited color palette, or similar to this. How would one go about limiting textures to a smaller color range (I'm assuming original pre-postprocess textures are higher fidelity), and is it all that is being done here, or is it something more going on?
Replies
you can quantize the screen coords to give yourself "lower resolution" fairly easily
palletising scenecolor shouldn't be a wildly different process to toon shading in principle (i.e use LUTs) - my best guess is that you'd want to work in HSV space, quantise and manipulate your values and then move everything back to RGB for output. I've not tried it so could well be wrong
it'd be interesting to look at how the original hardware handled the process and try to replicate that.
eg. you'd get systems with a palette of 512 colors but only able to display 16 at once (atari ST iirc)