The contours system is problematic.

[DoctorViper]

(Which is relevant for the dithering technique used in the OP, too, btw.)

Loftar, you're breaking my heart over here. I thought the method I used worked just fine. Sure, I could experiment further and fine-tune the noise values to be even better, and yeah, it DOES look kind of odd if used on the sails of a Knarr, but for getting an image onto a Heraldic cape, it did its job of preserving the color instead of being a purple, cyan, and white mess.

[Granger]

Could the available color palette be increased (RGB 3 bit per channel, if possible RGBA), preferably with the ability to include metallic spot colors (gold, silver,...)?

[loftar]

but for getting an image onto a Heraldic cape, it did its job of preserving the color instead of being a purple, cyan, and white mess.

My point was that even if it looks good on the preview page, there's a high chance of it turning weird in-game once it makes the trip through OpenGL.

RGB 3 bit per channel

Perhaps, but that would require 512 different craftable dyes. :)

[Granger]

RGB 3 bit per channel

Perhaps, but that would require 512 different craftable dyes.

Not really, you could just do some math mumbo-jumbo to come up with amounts needed of the current ones - lighter tones could just need less...

[DoctorViper]

My point was that even if it looks good on the preview page, there's a high chance of it turning weird in-game once it makes the trip through OpenGL.

So what I'm getting from this is to try and use less noise for the image, or experiment with a different dithering method altogether.

I jest, of course. But it honestly can't look any worse than... well...

[Bauta]

Why not add a literal palette? As in a wooden board where you can mix your colors.
It could just start with white and black, the cheapest paints to produce, to make shades of all the other colors.

As it is now it's kind of ridiculous.

dithering.png

Also jesus christ if all pics are reduced to a thumbnail in your current upload page, why is every single one on a newline? You could fit 10 in a single row.

[DoctorViper]

I wouldn't exactly recommend dithering, though, at least not for naïve users. By the time the image gets through mipmapping and texture filtering and whatnot, it is likely to not look the way you thought it would look. (Which is relevant for the dithering technique used in the OP, too, btw.)

but for getting an image onto a Heraldic cape, it did its job of preserving the color instead of being a purple, cyan, and white mess.

My point was that even if it looks good on the preview page, there's a high chance of it turning weird in-game once it makes the trip through OpenGL.

Get fucked. I did it, Jordon bought a sketch page to test my dithering method, and it WORKED.

But yeah. I still think some improvements to the contours/fields system would be great, and I'll still stand by that opinion for as long as I follow the development of this game.

[jacksonblu]

Wait, noise! You just add noise to trick the system! So, you open up your copy of Photoshop, and one image at a time, you add noise to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Di ... processing
While adding random noise does work, there are other forms of dithering that produce better looking images that more accurately represent the original.
For a comparison, I converted the original image to the in-game palette in Gimp using the Floyd-Steinberg dithering method.

Random Noise:

Floyd-Steinberg:

As you can see, using Floyd-Steinberg dithering produces images with a lot less "color fuzziness," for lack of a better word.

Versus

I don't know if this holds true 100% of the time, but another pro of using Floyd-Steiberg might be that it adds less contours than random-noise

[DoctorViper]

Wait, noise! You just add noise to trick the system! So, you open up your copy of Photoshop, and one image at a time, you add noise to them.

I don't know if this holds true 100% of the time, but another pro of using Floyd-Steiberg might be that it adds less contours than random-noise

How did you pull it off?

[jacksonblu]

How did you pull it off?

For this I used Gimp, although other image editing programs might offer similar options.
I started off by converting the image from RGB to Indexed mode, which allows you to convert the image to a palette, for which I created a custom palette made up of all the Haven pigments. It also allows you to use dithering when it converts the image. There are also many tutorials online for indexing an image that can help you. Also, if you use Gimp, make sure to export the image so that it gives you a usable file.
Here's an example, using our Glorious Leader