tga to 16 colors?

D4V1DC

How is this possible?

Also if anyone has been doing or knows someone with a portfolio on nintendo DS game art, please post or pm me some links I might be able to use as a reference. Trying to get a actual job that I really want and would apprechaite some help thanx guys.

Xaltar

Why would you want to create a 16 color image from a 24 or 32 bit one? Usualy, if you want a 16 color texture you paint it that way so you can choose your pallet. If you texture in 32bit color and convert to 16 you end up with a dithered mess, especially on DS size textures. If you convert a 1024 x 1024 texture for example you would get acceptable results but to convert a 128 x 128 or 64 x 64 you would end up with a mess that barely even resembles the original.

I use Paintshop Pro 7 and just decrease color depth to 4 bit. Thats pretty much it. Try a few different conversion settings and see what gives you the result you want.

Uly

Well, with the help from Adam Atomic (He usually frequents the CGTalk boards.) I know few tips, but not nearly as much as he. I would *strongly* recommend contacting him. He responds quickly and is very helpful.

I'll whip up a quick screenie tutorial for you. Stay posted.

Edit: Adam Atomic's website can be found at this address. His contact info is there too, of course.
Adam Atomic's Online Portfolio (Mostly DS, 4-Bit Artwork)

2x Edit: Ok, Tutorial is up. But I can't stress this enough. Talk to Adam, he knows far more about this than I do. (Poop and some other Polycounters have also dabbled in low-bit art as well, ask around.)

Rick Stirling

Promotion is a superb low colour painter that lets you define palettes. I also used to use DeBabelizer when working on Gameboy stuff (for taking a high colour image to low colour quickly).

D4V1DC

Hey,

Thanx very much all for your assistance and efforts to help me better understand what i've gotten myself into.:)

Xaltar: I'm a bit confused by [ QUOTE ]
24 or 32 bit one? Usualy, if you want a 16 color texture you paint it that way so you can choose your pallet. If you texture in 32bit color and convert to 16 you end up with a dithered mess

[/ QUOTE ] I understand that if I choose my top 16 colors those are all I can use & that I am restricted to them.

What about blending/smudge? That ultimately creates more colors doesnt?

I have heard a lot about jasc paintshop pro, i'll give it a shot today thanx.

Uly: That was a very very helpful tutorial thanx for taking the time to make it, it's very informative. You where right about adam he's quick also thanx for the link he's got some good stuff.

RS:
I checked out pro-motion & debabelizer though I kept seeing links that debabilizer is a mac os application?

I did though grab the trial to pro-motion though they have stopped releasing new updates seem to have stoped around 2005.

Thanx everyone.

Any new help apprechiated.

Xaltar

The colors don't really blend, all that happens is you would have for example blue and yellow in your pallet but no green, when you convert your 32bit image to that pallet your green would come out the nearest color on your pallet, probably blue. Now if you were to try and mix the yellow and blue all you would get is blue with yellow dots in it not green.

A color pallet is not like a paint pallet in real life, the colors do not blend, if you want a color it must be on your pallet. Even with 32bit images you can't really smudge colors into eachother to get new colors, you can set opacity lower than 100% and paint a yellow splodge on your blue and get a kinda green but its far more efficient to just pick green from your pallet.

Hope that helps and makes sense.

D4V1DC

It does make sense thanx, although I would like to know before I assume that I can use this other texture I made that looks 100x's better than the actual 16 color pallete painted with 1x brush in adobe. Is a sized down version painted with no color contraints at 256x256 and resize to 128x128 then converted to 16 colors.

It looks beautiful and I hope this is ok as it still uses 16 colors but it's so much better I cant stress it enough.
They requested 16 colors is this going to be a problem? It is still 16 colors just sized down and fixed up where needed with the 16 that was chosen for me.

I understand with the tutorial above that I can replace any colors that may need to be changed. So if I need a particular color I can just select which I dont need and over write it with the one I do.

I'll make a little item example of showing the difference's.

D4V1DC

This is just an example I used one of my lowpoly models:

Granted some parts need work I didnt get around to making it pretty but it does have some colors of the original. A dithered mess can be fixed up I think it saves some time also if you just lay down the main colors and size it down change to 16 colors it's a good base at least I think so. I have a 16 colors only design that looks terrible & I tried to do shading with 2 colors ect doesn't work.

BTW, what is the actual resolution size for a ds character?

Uly

Depends on the game and genre. Highest you'd probably ever find is a 256 or 128. And yes, it's best to start a 4-bit texture from scratch, that way you can plan out your palette in advance, and make the most out of your available shades. Adam's 4-bit texturing tutorial helps a lot. The tutorial goes into closer detail, but basically, you *will* be limited when creating 4-Bit art, you'll have to pick 2 colours or so, and then make the rest of the palette shades and highlights, etc.

Adam Atomic - 4Bit Texturing

Also, what 3d Package are you using? I'd highly recommend turning off texture filtering, as the DS doesn't even support it. Texture filtering also makes lowrez art look like muddy crap.

D4V1DC

I read his 4bit-texturing tutorial twice.

I have made a pallete with 16 colors though even trying to sacrifice between colors is difficult in this case as there are numerous colors incorporated into the design I am requested to create. I have a choice of either creating it with 16 colors or somewhere inbetween 16-256. I was trying for 16 it's not as easy as it may look if your trying to pull off a fab design. I really didn't want to go over 16 colors but looks like I may have to by just 4 or so colors.

I'll try my best to sacrifice more, too bad I can't show off what I have done. I do have a slight dithered design on the converted quality version but it pops so much. I'll give it another go sacrificing more colors and see what I can pull off from there.

EDIT: 3DSMax9 the texture filtering is in the render options correct? such as catmull-rom / anti-alias ect.?

Uly

Bleh. That's where you got me. What you're looking to turn off in particular is "BiLinear Filtering". (Sometimes called BiCubic for whatever reason.) If you find this option, you want to set it to Unfiltered. I use Maya, and only know how to turn off texture filtering in that particular program. And yeah, it is difficult choosing what colours to sacrifice, and planning out your palette in advance, all it takes, like anything else, is practice practice practice.

If you're stuck somewhere in your current texture, it wouldn't hurt to start from scratch, create a new optimized colour palette, and have another go at it. Second product is always better.

Either way, have at it. You seem to be grasping the concept much faster than I ever did, so keep working on it and let us know how it goes.

Eric Chadwick

I used to do palettes back in the day. Fun.

3ds Max viewport filtering is in Customize menu > Prefs > Viewports tab > Configure Driver > Texel Lookup (nearest) & MipMap Lookup (none).

Scanline renderer's filter is in Rendering > Render > Renderer tab > Filter Maps (uncheck), also might wanna check Disable All Samplers...

Emil Mujanovic

Technically, I don't think you can actually save out a targa with only 16 colours. Yes, you can index it but its still an 8-bit targa regardless. Had this problem while trying to crunch some textures here at work to reduce filesize and memory usage.
Best bet is to go with another filetype that supports 4-bit textures.
Feel free to challenge anything I've said, because I certainly would love to know how to get targas down to 4-bit.

-caseyjones

Uly

Eh, won't challenge what you said, but I'm pretty sure he's using BMPs rather than TGAs.

While we're on the topic of formats though, what's the largest difference between a BMP and TGA? Both lossless, BMP seems to be the preferred format for older platforms, because of their ability to go one step further than a TGA can in low-bit'ness. TGA's however can have 8-Bits reserved for an alpha channel.

Besides these two aspects, are there any other major differences between the formats?

Emil Mujanovic

[ QUOTE ]
Eh, won't challenge what you said, but I'm pretty sure he's using BMPs rather than TGAs.

[/ QUOTE ]
If that's the case, then indexing is fine. I just went off the thread topic "tga to 16 colors?"
I think you pretty much nailed the biggest difference between bitmap and targa. Alpha channels.

-caseyjones

D4V1DC

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone for helping me out again because I am now onto the 2nd part of the hiring process they enjoyed what I created w00t!

Wish me luck!
Almost there...

Uly

No problem $inz. Tell us how you did later. : )

dur23

Sinz: I wouldn't worry too much about the 16 colors sooo much. Most developers are gonna use the NNS/tga format that comes with the devkits. The DS can handle up to 64 256 palettes. The biggest problem with the dev is the size of your textures. 128s are kind of a sensitive file size, most teams where i am won't let you use them. Most of the characters i've created use 2 64s. Colors ranging anywhere between 16 to 256 colors. IF you want to use 16 colors, paint the colors yourself, don't let photoshop do it. Get the pencil and start droppin pixels.

D4V1DC

Hey dur23,
That's what I ended up doing though I just find that if a deadline is nearing I could use a dithered version of the 256 and fix up areas where it needs to be fixed. I find it works well on some designs not on all.

BTW, I made both versions 16 & 256 colors so they could pick which they rather use. Helps me out with texturing in both directions.

Yea man those 1xpixels are a pain in the rear and never thought I would actually be doing 1x pencil artwork. Though I find it does give me a huge insight into how colors work together. I feel I have learned much more about texturing than I have collectively over the years.

Thank you though guys for posting your comments I am glad I asked for help because now I have learned how DS/PSP games are generally made. Also Uly I will be dropping by with a big I Made IT!!! or.... =/ a sad I didn't.

Also I saw one of my designs on the DS w00t got real excited when I saw that . They edited my animations but idc my design was in a DS

We shall see in 9 days! or 8 now

dur23

Best of luck sinz.

And i made a mistake in saying that i used on average two 64's. For one of the titles there was a limit of 3 32's. I can't believe i already forgot how painful that was, trying to make "realistic" eyes with 3 pixels....

ploom2

photoshop needs 2 colours for some reason, so converting to 16 colours ussually makes it 14, plus black and white.

paintshop pro puts it to 16, but re arranges the palette ...so if its only using 12 colours, with forced palette, i think it goes a little wrong.

the easiest package i found was dpaint on pc (dos) , animpro (dos) ,...promotion is the best around these days..animpro had some amazing abilities...

the above info was, i think, along the correct lines ,

if u change the black/white colours photoshop doesnt think its 16colours any more..or something like that..

i spent months sorting out a nice process trying to keep in photoshop ..then of course theres the issue of using correct colour resolution (rgb values)...often worth doing before droping to 16 colours..i think it was posterize or something like that in photoshop... (i.e. if u make a grey gradient of 256 colours, only 16/32 of those shades might actually be different on target platform, and those are using the rgb values u want to stick with)

again, this was actually based on doin 4bit 3d artowkr on mobile phone games..

i think i only ever used single pixel type work in ps, that way it doesnt generate aliasing and loads of extra colours.

D4V1DC

Thanx Dur & the pain of 16 colors .

ploom2:
That posterize didn't do so well when I tried it though I didn't try it with a grey scale image.

I found if you keep the majority of the colors the same like a nice red/purple it does pretty good to convert it to 16 colors from a 256 palette.
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Anyw00t, I am getting checks every time I am done with a set they need though I think they only want me as a freelance artist which isn't what I want since I don't get any benefits as a contracted artist.

It's better pay than I have gotten though I really want to be signed on rather than off the books A.F.A.I.K.

So W00t I'm getting paid!