Outdoor environment color palettes?

MainManiac

My scenes just art working together well at all when it comes to color, and I can't think up a palette for the life of me.


Anyone know any tricks or resources for creating a working moody color scheme for environments?

passerby

just try and contrast your highlights and shadows, if going really orangey for your sunlight highlights, go for purple on shadows.

jeremiah_bigley

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

or... Find a picture of a color scheme you like and load it into...
http://kuler.adobe.com/#create/fromanimage

Would also be nice if you could upload a picture for us and maybe we could help you a little more

Eric Chadwick

Reference examples help a ton, in my experience. Start building a library of lighting examples you really like. Then try to replicate them in your software of choice.

MainManiac

Well this is actually going to be an iphone app so I can't really push too much because a sky box wont be visible along with fog not supported etc, which is why I needed the colors themselves to work.

Thanks for the links jeremiah!

@Passerby, are shadows really complimentary of harsh colored sunlight?

Ark

Shadow's draw there colour from skylight, so yeah they would be a bluish tint on a clear blue sky, providing the sun is out to cast clear shadows. If it's a cloudy or overcast day then the shadows will be a lot more desaturated and more of a grey/dark grey colour.

Shadows are not always complimentary, but people use this because it creates good colour contrast. The translucency of the shadow is just has important has the colour has this changes on the amount of available fill-light from the sky.

First decide what mood and atmosphere you want to recreate in your scene, are you going to be depicting realism? If so then look at how the colours of the sun change throughout the day, from warm colours in the morning to a desaturated yellow by midday and back to warm colours in the evening.

If you want to portray a night scene, then don't just leave your scene dark, use desaturated blue lights to represent the sky light and a white/beige/blue light to represent moonlight.

Another tip would be to pick a set of colours and stick with them, too many different coloured lights just makes a scene look unseated.
Again going back to the complimentary colours, you can pick three colours from the colour wheel that represents a triangle and this will also give you good contrast.

Also don't forgot that each colour has a meaning behind it, i.e. red normally represents danger, death, blood whereas green represents nature and so on.

MainManiac

Id like to bump this to ask if anyone knows a good rule of thumb to "tint" an environment to match a palette? I learned the hard way that grass cant just be green and dirt cant just be brown, they have to be more similar in color but im not really sure about the thought behind this. Elwynn forest is a good example in WoW. The entire place is a lush green, and it almost looks like the hue of every color was shifted a bit towards green in the photoshop color column, does this make sense?

Eric Chadwick

I'm doing a lot of color grading right now, which is exactly this. First I adjust the colors of every element in the scene (or at least all those I can get my hands on) to get as close as possible to my desired result.

Then I use a color grading element to push the colors exactly where I want them, adding or removing contrast, coloring the shadows, pulling back or increasing the bloom, adjusting fog color/intensity/neardistance/fardistance.

In one game I worked on recently, we used a bitmap to control the color grading. In the current game we're working on, I control it by coloring a bloom setting.

It's pretty hard to teach good color design. I think it just has to be learned by lots of observation and lots of painting. A great exercise is to paint a copy of a master's painting, which will force you to learn which colors to use where. Check out the artists associated with the Hudson River School. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_School
Also check out Albert Bierstadt, one of my favorites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bierstadt

There's a really good book I finished recently from James Gurnery called Color and Light, where he goes into good detail about color choices. A great read. http://jamesgurney.com/books.html

I think it all comes down to observation. Learn what colors look great together, and learn it from both real life, and from master painters.

Eric Chadwick

Here are some good links, especially for you maybe the 2nd one.
http://wiki.polycount.com/Model%20Presentation

Jeff Parrott

I'll second Color and Light. That book is definitely more than worth a few reads.