Gredler: I'm comfortable working with values of 36 and don't sample palettes like that anymore, but here's the one I found most useful, which Tom put together a long time ago:
I try to push uneven values to get subtler shades or more interesting coloring. Like upping an RGB value which is at 0 during a gradient asap and twisting an overall color into different directions. Something like starting blue and quickly turning from purples to mostly "hot" reds can looking much nicer than steady straight jumps in each value of a particular red. (
I also try to avoid using pure black or pure white).
A good example is the marble base in the hallway scene of Henshin Engine. The similar part in SotN is a boring monochromatic gradient of brown-grays. In Henshin Engine, it goes from black to blue to purple to gray, until finally beginning the true beige palette. It may be working around the limits of 9-bit color, but doing so can still look much nicer than a lot of the unimaginative stuff devs bitd did while having unlimited shades to choose from on other hardware.
It's gotten to the point now, where I don't waste time thinking through
exactly how I'll color something before pixelling it out. Now I usually just pick any old color and do a boring straight gradient until it's more or less finished being sculpted. Then I begin playing with the values of each shade to try to do something interesting and if I get enough room from subtler shades, I add in extras if I can, while keeping the scene balanced.
Sometimes tossing in a color which breaks the existing transitioning or even clashes with the rest can make something look or work much nicer.
In this scene I was trying to use as few tiles as possible and it was tough balancing the color of the building texture so that it worked for for the distinct parts and not having too sharp of contrast, so that it wouldn't stand out more than the layer which goes in front of it. It only sort of clicked into place finally when I tweaked a few colors near the dark and light ends so that they clashed with what look like the purple shades. It kept the shading subtle enough to work and the clashing works as texturing, while blending well with the overall background scene, which uses sort of parallel colors. The thing is, if you sample the pink and peach looking colors on the building, they're actually fairly normal looking purples. It just creates an illusion which works much better than colors that technically blend smoothly.
The roof tile does the pixelart equivalent of this. Since I couldn't get any kind of shingle pattern to tile correctly in a 16 x 16 pixel swatch, I purposely broke the pattern and shaded parts of it darker in a way which created the diagonal striping. At a glance it looks fine, but up close you can see that it has those alternate shades in each stripe every 16 pixels, technically creating a horizontal seam. It was the only way to differentiate the shingles in those spots, otherwise there'd be a splotch of the same color. If I had added another shade, then it would look too dark or light on one end.
I've started getting better results pushing the 9-bit palette by trying things like this which seem counter intuitive, but only after I stopped sampling everything from that palette sheet and started playing with values. Porting graphics from other hardware to PCE color for fun in my spare time is what helped me the most. I purposely looked for stuff which should be impossible to pull off in 9-bit color. It also helped me get a feel for balancing the overall contrast and making certain elements stand out more or less, depending on their role in a scene.
The correct interval between RGB shades should be (255/7), or 36.42857.
However, if you look at the PCE through composite video, the colours will ramp up differently anyway due to its kinda weird digital composite encoder
Thanks a lot.
I figured that it was consistent and I was hoping that Tom's comments about what the colors really look like was more based on what stock hardware ends up outputting.
The Genesis' shades don't get too dark or bright on either end, while the middle is closer to PCE integers. I had trouble matching some of the funkier looking colors for a project and was surprised how some of the shades of certain colors look more like SMS coloring.
Topic: Correct PCE color values? (Read 783 times)
