Creating DS Textures
polycounter lvl 17
The DS has supports 18-Bit (260 000) colors. In photoshop, how do you tell your color palette to only display colors that are 18-bit? I don't know if its something totally noob of me to not know, but I can't find it in the photoshop help files either. Thanks for any help
Replies
cheers,
-Ryan
edit:
On second thought, your desktop at 16 bits might NOT be good preview, because of dithering. Instead, save your image as a 16-bit BMP, and reload it. That will definitely work!
Here is the answer....
Hi, it supports 16 bit textures and depending on the format that is just for the ds you can use 24 bit color. That said you need to show you can do the 16 bit colors. What you do is pick 16 colors. Three colors are already going to be used one is white, black and another usually pink for transparent areas. I'm not clear if black and white have to be in there but I assumed they didn't I just take out 3 colors for planning purposes and if I happen to need them I use them. You paint with a tool that doesn't blend colors and is 100% hard. The pencil tool is your best bet for this.
To save your pallete once it done you go in photoshop
under Image/mode/index color
go to the drop down menu and set that to custom and your pallete table shows up. the first three colors I think are forced. I suggest you ask on the boards. then you have free reign on how many colors you add and thats it. I think if you go and save as bmp it will let you save as 4 bit texture.
Ideally you want to paint at res, the idea of downsizing at ds res doesn't cut it, it looks like crap and the time cleaning up is not worth it. Experiment so you can get a good workflow going. Then have a uv wire representation in vectors. If you have Max use the uvw unwrap to paths pluging if not then render your wires at high res with black and white, copy and paste that in quick mask mode into a new layer by pressing Q. This may or may not work cause I have not tried it. But either once you leave quick mask mode you should be able to turn your selection into paths, (vectors) or used the stroke option in layer fxs. When you resize your texture to say 32 x 32 it should scale down fine. then you can use that guide to paint at the res.
I'm curious to see what you are working on, so either post it in the pimp section show me. I love to talk about 3D stuff. Hope that helps, take care.
To answer your question I didn't set it to 16 bit color I just use 16 colors knowing it would look good while I painted.
Alex
In any case, the colors in your palette or image will get truncated to 5 bits per channel.
For more about texture formats, see http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm#ds3dtextureformats
Personally, I'd very seldom if ever use the technique that Sage suggests picking the pallette before you begin. Paint the texture in full 24 bit, keeping in mind that you don't want to use too many different colours on it and then reduce it to indexed 15 colour (black is forced, which is annoying.) If you've got a transparent colour, select custom and pop it in the first slot. This will result in far better quality textures. You'll br surprised how much detail you can keep in a 16 colour texture.
16 bit and 16 colour aren't the same thing. Don't get those confused.
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They are different things, but not mutually exclusive things.
In this case, you can have a full 16bit RGB texture, with 32768 colors (Format 7).
Or you can have an indexed texture with 4, 16, or 256 colors out of a possible 32768 (Formats 2, 3, and 4).
In both cases (indexed and RGB) photoshop shows 8bits per channel while the DS sees 5bits per channel.
The 16-color format is enough for some images... but in many cases I think the 256-color format represents the best compromise between space and quality.
I'll use Optimus as an example in honor of the movie. Suppose this were the concept art for the character, it would be nice to be able to use the window labeled "color table" for my color picker. You cannot do anything while the "color table" window is open, including using the eyedropper. I'm starting to feel that I'm making this more complicated than it should be....