Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pmBoard: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
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Page 1 of 11
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pm
Board: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
Thanks for your help. For now I guess this is solved and I'll post again in the future if I have more problems.
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pm
Board: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
I'm not entirely sure what to say right now because immediately after my last post I had a critical problem with my palettes. First it was working good, then all of them started messing up completely in both Photoshop and mugen, then after about 40 minutes of tinkering around doing random things everything works now in Photoshop and mugen and FF3. I don't know what I did, in fact I don't think I did anything different from usual to fix it. So I don't know if it was a glitch in Photoshop or what.
For right now everything seems to be working OK. I think the most important thing was switching to FF3 so thanks a lot for that I appreciate it. I am probably going to have a hundred more problems down the road but right now I'll deal with what I have.
I guess my important question now is if my pipeline is OK. I don't have a big sheet with everything I plan on it. I usually start off with a PSD with a base on the bottom layer and work in RGB for a particular animation, such as a run or a punch. I work with different colours in different orders. When I'm done doing all the frames on different layers, I save each one off as an RGB png, then open each one and add the indexed palette to them. Is that an OK way to work? I thought it caused a major problem related to what I said above in this post, but now it seems to be working fine (don't know to what extent though).
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pm
Board: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
I don't think I explained correctly. I'm a bit wordy so sorry in advance.
Basically I have no idea what colours I'm going to end up using. I end up having a pipeline along this road:
1) I create a sprite in RGB. I save the sprite as a .png, then index it, and save the resulting palette.
2) I create the next sprite. It may have two or three colours sprite 1 did not have. I save it as a .png, index it, load the palette from sprite 1 and add the missing colours. I save the palette.
3) I go back to sprite 1 and load the updated palette from sprite 2.
4) I repeat this process for each sprite. If I update the palette on sprite 19, I will load up the previous 18 sprites and load the palette I saved on sprite 18.
By the way, I got FF3 from what you suggested. From what I can see at an immediate glance, it solved the problems I was having plus the discolouration problem; however, I'm still not familiar with technical specifics and I have a feeling I'm still doing the palettes wrong (especially down the road when I'll want to have multiple palettes when you change colours in the menu). A problem I'm facing at the moment is that although transparency shows up from Colour 0 in FF3, it does not show up in mugen.
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pm
Board: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
Thank you for the response, I will try that right now.
I'd like to mention something else that I didn't really touch on above which might have to do with my issue. I've never used indexed colours before. I'm an artist so I am always working with RGB and just save it in whatever format is required but I've never done pixel work. The way I started doing this is I grabbed some of the sprites that I used as a base, converted them to RGB, drew with 16 or so different colours (using different layers in a PSD file to make it easier), and saved out different RGB .png files. After I was done with those frames, I ended up with about 46 colours total out of my 20 or so sprites I did, and I opened up each PNG file, and made sure they had the same palette.
I created the palette by first opening up one frame, going to exact, then going to custom and saving. I would open up another frame that had new colours, go to custom, eyedrop the missing colours into the palette, etc. for each frame. When I was done, I saved the final current palette to all of the frames.
Is that going to cause problems? Each frame should have the same palette after I converted them to indexed files, but I have no clue what the technical specifics are with how palettes operate. My fear is that say colour 1 is blue, colour 2 is red, colour 3 is green, colour 4 is yellow in the colour table, but I drew the next sprite in a different order where maybe colour 1 was red, colour 2 was green, etc. Does the placement of the colours (sans Colour 0) matter in relation to how you drew the sprite? Or does it not matter where any of the colours are in the colour table so long as it uses that exact hex value, and it finds it on its own?
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pm
Board: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
Hey. I'm new to this stuff and this is my first time doing sprites and so far I feel I'm doing decent, except for the technical side of things. I have a feeling that I started doing this all wrong so I'd like to find out if it's something I can easily fix or if I have to start over.
Essentially, being new to spriting I read some of the initial documentation and I used an already-existing character as a base. I jumped right into spriting, ripping the png files of the sprite and drawing over all of them with new sprites. In the last week I did several different animations, I created a palette in Photoshop, I assigned the palette to different png files to test them.
So far I know very little about Fighter Factory (I'm using Ultimate) and how mugen sets up characters, but I learned a few things on my own in the last week. I managed to incorporate my sprites over the already-existing character file that I mentioned I'm using as a base, but they will not show up unless I turn off shared palette, then I have to edit the transparency manually. I figured that was because I didn't set up the palette files in FF but I ignored that at that time since I wanted to see how it would look in game. The animations ran fine in the game although even though I turned off shared palette, the colours were slightly off from the original PNG file. Parts of the character that were supposed to be greyish green were a lot more saturated and some of the shading disappeared. I again attributed that to not setting up a proper palette.
Now after deciding I want to learn how to do the palette properly, I added the palette file I used for my sprites into FFU. On the front page I associated the first palette to the one I created. All of the already-existing sprites turned completely black. When I go to my own sprites I created with the palette assigned to them, they are black and white. The only part where there is white pixels is the outline of the character. Everything inside and outside of the character is black. I've done several tests doing different things to this and it even does it if I turned off shared palette. The only "improvement" I could find so far was to create an indexed pcx file which I "reverse engineered" from an incorrectly-assigned PNG file in FFU and saved over it as a PCX file. All that did was add shading to the black/white character with ugly pink and green colours randomly in the palette.
So, briefly, I have no clue why my palette is not working in FFU and all of my sprites are black and white. Is this something I have to start over completely or am I just setting something up in FFU wrong?
Page 1 of 11
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pmBoard: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pmBoard: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
For right now everything seems to be working OK. I think the most important thing was switching to FF3 so thanks a lot for that I appreciate it. I am probably going to have a hundred more problems down the road but right now I'll deal with what I have.
I guess my important question now is if my pipeline is OK. I don't have a big sheet with everything I plan on it. I usually start off with a PSD with a base on the bottom layer and work in RGB for a particular animation, such as a run or a punch. I work with different colours in different orders. When I'm done doing all the frames on different layers, I save each one off as an RGB png, then open each one and add the indexed palette to them. Is that an OK way to work? I thought it caused a major problem related to what I said above in this post, but now it seems to be working fine (don't know to what extent though).
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pmBoard: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
Basically I have no idea what colours I'm going to end up using. I end up having a pipeline along this road:
1) I create a sprite in RGB. I save the sprite as a .png, then index it, and save the resulting palette.
2) I create the next sprite. It may have two or three colours sprite 1 did not have. I save it as a .png, index it, load the palette from sprite 1 and add the missing colours. I save the palette.
3) I go back to sprite 1 and load the updated palette from sprite 2.
4) I repeat this process for each sprite. If I update the palette on sprite 19, I will load up the previous 18 sprites and load the palette I saved on sprite 18.
By the way, I got FF3 from what you suggested. From what I can see at an immediate glance, it solved the problems I was having plus the discolouration problem; however, I'm still not familiar with technical specifics and I have a feeling I'm still doing the palettes wrong (especially down the road when I'll want to have multiple palettes when you change colours in the menu). A problem I'm facing at the moment is that although transparency shows up from Colour 0 in FF3, it does not show up in mugen.
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pmBoard: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
I'd like to mention something else that I didn't really touch on above which might have to do with my issue. I've never used indexed colours before. I'm an artist so I am always working with RGB and just save it in whatever format is required but I've never done pixel work. The way I started doing this is I grabbed some of the sprites that I used as a base, converted them to RGB, drew with 16 or so different colours (using different layers in a PSD file to make it easier), and saved out different RGB .png files. After I was done with those frames, I ended up with about 46 colours total out of my 20 or so sprites I did, and I opened up each PNG file, and made sure they had the same palette.
I created the palette by first opening up one frame, going to exact, then going to custom and saving. I would open up another frame that had new colours, go to custom, eyedrop the missing colours into the palette, etc. for each frame. When I was done, I saved the final current palette to all of the frames.
Is that going to cause problems? Each frame should have the same palette after I converted them to indexed files, but I have no clue what the technical specifics are with how palettes operate. My fear is that say colour 1 is blue, colour 2 is red, colour 3 is green, colour 4 is yellow in the colour table, but I drew the next sprite in a different order where maybe colour 1 was red, colour 2 was green, etc. Does the placement of the colours (sans Colour 0) matter in relation to how you drew the sprite? Or does it not matter where any of the colours are in the colour table so long as it uses that exact hex value, and it finds it on its own?
Posted by BlueF
in [SOLVED] Palette issue in FF (Started by BlueF February 29, 2012, 11:53:55 pmBoard: M.U.G.E.N Development Help
Essentially, being new to spriting I read some of the initial documentation and I used an already-existing character as a base. I jumped right into spriting, ripping the png files of the sprite and drawing over all of them with new sprites. In the last week I did several different animations, I created a palette in Photoshop, I assigned the palette to different png files to test them.
So far I know very little about Fighter Factory (I'm using Ultimate) and how mugen sets up characters, but I learned a few things on my own in the last week. I managed to incorporate my sprites over the already-existing character file that I mentioned I'm using as a base, but they will not show up unless I turn off shared palette, then I have to edit the transparency manually. I figured that was because I didn't set up the palette files in FF but I ignored that at that time since I wanted to see how it would look in game. The animations ran fine in the game although even though I turned off shared palette, the colours were slightly off from the original PNG file. Parts of the character that were supposed to be greyish green were a lot more saturated and some of the shading disappeared. I again attributed that to not setting up a proper palette.
Now after deciding I want to learn how to do the palette properly, I added the palette file I used for my sprites into FFU. On the front page I associated the first palette to the one I created. All of the already-existing sprites turned completely black. When I go to my own sprites I created with the palette assigned to them, they are black and white. The only part where there is white pixels is the outline of the character. Everything inside and outside of the character is black. I've done several tests doing different things to this and it even does it if I turned off shared palette. The only "improvement" I could find so far was to create an indexed pcx file which I "reverse engineered" from an incorrectly-assigned PNG file in FFU and saved over it as a PCX file. All that did was add shading to the black/white character with ugly pink and green colours randomly in the palette.
So, briefly, I have no clue why my palette is not working in FFU and all of my sprites are black and white. Is this something I have to start over completely or am I just setting something up in FFU wrong?