i guess a "colorset_map", would be better rather to use the alpha channel. 😉

and, yes nfs4 uses 4 textures, 1 per upgrade state, but that's not needed as long as you don't like to have "decorative rims" or changing interiors,

or a changing texture overall.

just think of it as if you would give each range of the greyscale either the same or a different random material, basically.

i guess some "rule" would be needed how the alternate color has to appear, for the cars the modeler can specify a palette but i didn't think that's what we would need.

perhaps 3 ranges would be fine and you can "rotate" the alternate colors by i.e. the first alternate color 40° the second 160° (40°+120°), i tried to experiment a bit with that, it results in not to agressive alternate colors. perhaps a additional noise on the "rotation" for the alternate colors will help to. and of course 360° is 0°, if it overlaps just start at 0.

perhaps it would be possible (just as a further idea), to have actually something like a "palette", but more like a "rule", it would at least leave the possibility to to say, "no i don't like to have such a wide range, i like to setup 30°,+30°"

Not sure I understand you're colourmap "rotations" Gernot, can you explain it again another way? Perhaps with an example?

The way I've done colourisation was to have two textures.

1st texture is just a regular texture with painted diffuse details - use this on parts of the model that you don't want re-coloured.

2nd texture uses only 3 colours (0-255,0,0) / (0,0-255,0) / (0,0,0-255), i.e: shades of red, green or blue. Then you pick your primary, secondary and tertiary colours which can be anything the player wants and the rest is handled by the engine (either creating a re-coloured texture, or doing it in a shader in realtime). This texture is applied to parts of the model that you want to recolour.

This limits you to 3 modifiable colours, but it handles many shades of those colours, which lets you preserve lighting/dirt/normal details even in the colourisation texture.

Is this the use that you're thinking of? or have I completely misunderstood? 😆

Andy

sounds to me like the better solution

if i understand that right the modeler sets R, G, B, each representing a later to define material, yes i think that will workout the same.

...2012 we have

i was thinking of a greyscale to "mark" via UV mapping the body colors "body, alternate color, dress, helmet " to stay with the exampe from NFS4.

anyway i made a chart of what i've imagined and how it was used in NFS4 more or less (i remember i had to make a raster in fact to blend from body to alternate, i only wished back then or thought, "hey why they didn't used all 2*64?", ok, they havn't forseen someone comes along and likes to have bubbles on his car when it's upgraded"), i guess the same can be done with your way of mapping with exclusion for a fourth "dress" color, you can say it exists only here because 256/3 didn't works.

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in words, i would like to use primary and secondary for the body if it's possible to let them fade or blend then it's cool, more then enough.

the tertiary i would use for a fixed ranking color e.g my "squad colors", each representing a rank / score, i know we havn't yet, but we can think of already.

edit: should probably fade to transparency instead of blending, i thought about that it might be a problem to let it look used.

while the primary and secondary won't need that, you will have to be satisfied with what the diffuse map offers. but i guess a rank marker must fade, else it looks a little lumpy (to hard).

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we textile workers look at a color-circle and not a color-range

that's where the rotation comes from, it was only a idea, i was thinking of how it could be left to the random material by using a "harmony".

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further, i thought about that, we have a bitdepth limit, i mean we can't have endless mappings, i assume.