The end of the "pain in the .... true color bitmap?"

When you use SBB to create a storyboard from bitmaps, you end with a true color storyboard, and you need to convert it to a 256 color bitmap, using a civ compatible palette.

Here is a little something that may be useful.

But first, I need some feedback from the unit creators.

At first, you load a true color bitmap, and you get a preview (top right)
In the bottom right, you have a preview of the palette. At the beginning, it's empty and includes only the civ III mandatory colors (civ colours + shadow + smoke + background)

Then, you click on analyse picture, and the program tells you how many different colors you have in the picture.

Then you click on "Predefined color reduction", and the program will remove colors if they are close enough from one of the colors already in the palette (civ colors, smoke, etc). You can do this several time, increase the threshold used to tell two colors are equal, until you get to a reasonable number (here around 500).

Then you click on "Color reduction", and the program will analyze the removing colours, find the two closests, and from these two colours remove the one which is the less use in the picture, and it repeats the process until the number of colours is < 160.

Now you can a preview of the resulting palette.

What's left to be done:
- allow the user to pick different colours for smoke, background, shadow, before predefined color reduction
- save the bitmap at the end.

So, now I'm waiting for some feedback

Steph said:

What's left to be done:
- allow the user to pick different colours for smoke, background, shadow, before predefined color reduction

Click to expand...

Are civ-specifics included in here?

This looks like another fantastic time saving utility. I really hate sorting out pallettes 'cos it's so dull. Hopefully it should also increase quality, increasing the amount of colours used (I hardly ever, personally, use all the colours I can)

What would we do without you Steph?

This would save a whole lot of time.

Is the picture above the pallete a preview of what it would look like with the pallete below it?

I don't know about saving time (for me creating a custom palette is quick and easy) BUT it will increase the colour quality in the final unit. Selecting the colours by hand I always seem to miss a shade or two from some colours, which lowers the quality of the final unit. (picking all the colours by hand from the SW view frames and finding that in FLICster the colours for the NE directions are screwed because of different lighting and shadows is common)

I'm markedly unenthusiastic about this part of the palette, it's hardcoded in some way in civ, so I'd like a possibility to just fill these three rows with cyan or some other unused colour.
If you try to palette edit a unit you can otherwise get problems form this area, it's ruined at least one colour edit for me. I'm quite sure embryodead agrees with me, btw.

Freezing civ color is presently a pain in the ass, especially since my paint shop pro trial expired. This would help?

Don't know if this'll help at all Steph, but I've developed a simple error proof way to come up with my palettes.
- make a render that has no civ-color, shadow, or magenta
- load it into paint shop pro
- choose "palette from image" and set it at 160 colors (what's left of the 256 after essential colors)
- then use Pedit and add those 160 colors to the essential colors.

This process only takes me about 30 seconds, and it provides me with a great palette every time.

This looks like a wonderful tool (but then CamJH's method seems good too). Of course for people without Paint Shop Pro or a similar program it seems like it would be a great tool.

I think that the automated palette maker would sometimes be handy, but sometimes might be a bit ... awkward. Especially in the image areas where civ-colouring meets other strong colours, there might be left some 'blueish oranges or the like in that process. Altough I'm not sure about that. Besides Pedit works fine for me

But nevertheless, this would be a helpful tool for some people, Steph

vbraun said:

This would save a whole lot of time.

Is the picture above the pallete a preview of what it would look like with the pallete below it?

Click to expand...

It's the original picture, so you can pick colors and assign it manually to the palette. It will be used mainly to select the shadow and smokes colors, because there's no way to know them automatically.

CamJH said:

Don't know if this'll help at all Steph, but I've developed a simple error proof way to come up with my palettes.
- make a render that has no civ-color, shadow, or magenta
- load it into paint shop pro
- choose "palette from image" and set it at 160 colors (what's left of the 256 after essential colors)
- then use Pedit and add those 160 colors to the essential colors.

This process only takes me about 30 seconds, and it provides me with a great palette every time.

Click to expand...

It works for people who are rendering pictures. But if you are making a munit from different units, with different palette, then you cannot use this method

Good point.
And this does really look like a wonderful utility, I forgot to mention that in my earlier post.

Looks like an exelent idea, one thing to take note of is that neomega and I have noticed that the smoke colours in the pallette and in flickster are not the same as those used in game, they are in a different order which causes strange effects when a custom unit with smoke is used in game.

Neither of us have yet managed to make a full investigation, (though Neomega did a fairly quick test) so it may be a good idea to include something that will sort smoke colours in to the correct order to get the best in game effect.

Heres how to make a full investigation..

#1 make a single unit made up of the lower part of the above pallette divided in to squares (the bit with smoke, shadow and the two blank colours). the colours used in the unit must be exactly the same as those used in it's smoke/shadow pallette.

#2 make some terrain edits, what you want is a grassland, plains, desert etc... tile set which is totaly coloured 255,0,255 magenta.

#3 add the unit to a scenario that uses the blank magenta tile set.

#4 place a couple of the pallette units on an area of flat plains or grasslands (whatever, it's all going to be pink). Open up the scenario in CIv III and take a screen shot of the area that includes at least one of the units.

#5 Using that screen shot, create a new pallette (or part of a pallette) and transfer the exact colours and tones from the screenshot in to thier related possitions on the pallette.
This should give you a pallette that is exactly the same as the shadows and smoke in game so that if your unit has shadows a certain tone or density, they should remain the same when transfered in to the game.

Unfortuantely I can't do this for a number of reasons, not least of which I don't have civ III installed at the moment, but if anyone else would care to do it I'm sure the whole civ comunity would be forever gratefull.

From this point steph, you could include a number of preset pallettes, where you choose just one of the colours to replace a key smoke or shadow colour in the image (best to leave the blank background colour seperate for those units which have shadows or smoke a different colour from the background) and all the others are picked to match it.

I did this some weeks ago. It was a repetition of neomega's experiment. I used this for Dom's Annam and Hindu Spearman. This values make the perfect antialiasing in CIV3, but people will complain about the preview in Flicster.

Here are the exact values from the game for pink and white background:

Pink background (255 0 255):

Smoke:
231 24 231
222 40 222
214 32 214
214 56 214
214 89 214
181 56 181
189 89 189
214 142 214
165 81 165
140 65 140
123 48 123
173 113 173
214 190 214
140 105 140
107 73 107
66 40 66

Shadow:
8 0 8
24 0 24
40 0 40
57 0 57
73 0 73
90 0 90
106 0 106
123 0 123
139 0 139
156 0 156
172 0 172
189 0 189
205 0 205
222 0 222
238 0 238
255 0 255


White background (255 255 255):

Smoke:
231 231 231
222 223 222
214 215 214
214 215 214
214 215 214
181 182 181
189 190 189
214 215 214
165 166 165
140 142 140
123 121 123
173 174 173
214 215 214
140 142 140
107 105 107
66 65 66

Shadow:
8 8 8
24 24 24
41 40 41
57 56 57
74 73 74
90 89 90
107 105 107
123 121 123
140 142 140
156 158 156
173 174 173
189 190 189
206 207 206
222 223 222
239 239 239
255 255 255

Click to expand...

Steph said:

allow the user to pick different colours for smoke, background, shadow, before predefined color reduction

Click to expand...

The best would be the creator sets the base colors manually (index "6" for the civ-color and index "249" for the shadows) and all other civ- and shadow colors will automatically adjust relative to this. Is this possible?

this will definately help for making munits. would it be possible to make it output a pcx instead of just a bmp?

no pcx support, sorry

@aluminium

I think it would be possible... but how to get the exact color for all the civ colors and the shadows from only index 6 and index 249? And the smoke?

Hmmm... So I guess that the pallette should look roughly like this?

I can deffinately see why my smoke has never come out properly in the game.
Only about three of the so called smoke colours are actualy brighter than the standard 255,0,255 magenta colour...

I'll have to try it out...

{EDIT} it's bizare though, why would anyone purposefully layout the colours like that? It really does'nt make sense.

For someone that doesn't make units, you sure seem quite aware of some of the most tedious of problems Steph!

1- I don't make unit, but convert them. Same palette problems
2- I need to know how it works, so I can convert them to my format for SSS