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A Help Topic: How Do You Make Color Palettes for Characters? (Read 5702 times)

Started by Dude01, April 06, 2025, 01:42:51 am
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Dude01

A Help Topic: How Do You Make Color Palettes for Characters?
#1  April 06, 2025, 01:42:51 am
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Okay This Topic May sound a dumb and nonsense "help topic". So I ask for help like any tips for me to make, cuz i got no experience of making color pals for characters when it comes to anything in general. So i wanted to know how it works.

And I wanted to make color pals (Like how Mid117, MT7 etc.. srsly i feel like i'm glazing them, which is a bad habit of mine *sigh*) so that I wanted to stop requestin from those guys, cuz man i feel like "man i wanted to do it, but idk how and maybe i might mess it up" and i feel like I'm annoying them tbh and i really wanted to do something.

So i wanted to make this "help topic" just to know and learn the basics of making color palettes like any tutorial for me to understand it, cuz whenever I see "Character Reference Color Pals" i was like Aye that fits the aesthetic of the character like How OHMSBY Stye Char has that type and others too.

PS i have ff3 but idk how to use it well from making color pals
Real reason I'm Called "Dude" Cuz I watched Regular Show WOOOOOOAHH

Basara Bogard

Re: A Help Topic: How Do You Make Color Palettes for Characters?
#2  April 06, 2025, 10:21:42 pm
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First of all, you need an image editor to change the color to palettes, FF3 only serves you to edit some colors (if that works) and to save it into ACT file. To make palettes, the first thing you've to do is to take a sprite (PCX, but also could works PNG) with the main palette of your character, which has to be in 256 colors, and then editing the palette the image editing program of your choice (since Photoshop to GIMP, personally I use Paint Shop Pro) and there change the colors. After that, you can save the image with another name and save the palette into ACT or in PAL file. If the former, then you can add this file to the DEF file and that's all, if it's the last, then you've to convert it into ACT to make it work.

beterhans

Re: A Help Topic: How Do You Make Color Palettes for Characters?
#3  April 07, 2025, 05:19:25 pm
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Dude01 said, April 06, 2025, 01:42:51 am
Okay This Topic May sound a dumb and nonsense "help topic". So I ask for help like any tips for me to make, cuz i got no experience of making color pals for characters when it comes to anything in general. So i wanted to know how it works.

And I wanted to make color pals (Like how Mid117, MT7 etc.. srsly i feel like i'm glazing them, which is a bad habit of mine *sigh*) so that I wanted to stop requestin from those guys, cuz man i feel like "man i wanted to do it, but idk how and maybe i might mess it up" and i feel like I'm annoying them tbh and i really wanted to do something.

So i wanted to make this "help topic" just to know and learn the basics of making color palettes like any tutorial for me to understand it, cuz whenever I see "Character Reference Color Pals" i was like Aye that fits the aesthetic of the character like How OHMSBY Stye Char has that type and others too.

PS i have ff3 but idk how to use it well from making color pals


I made this before.
it's the 1st one in the play list
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHYRkaqvFmk&list=PLdEQ2Uq3HHramsbW8raOnWdPLfgesBwpW

Odb718

Re: A Help Topic: How Do You Make Color Palettes for Characters?
#4  April 11, 2025, 08:07:35 am
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I'd suggest using FF3 to edit palettes. It's super easy and just as strong as any other tool for making palettes. The main thing is to SAVE AND REOPEN your character when doing major palette edits in your char. Sometimes FF3 forgets....

If you're interested in learning about editing chars, I put this together to help out
https://mugenguild.com/forum/topics/mugen-101-things-you-need-know-169758.0.html
If you want to know more about something, you can click the blue links to take you to each part.

As for making palettes for characters, I'd suggest using Fighter Factory 3 only. It's easy enough and you don't have to worry about importing or exporting.
But if you use FF3, just hit ctrl+P to open the Advanced Palette Editor. What ever sprite you're on will open up. So I like to find a sprite of my main char that has all the highlights and shadows and glow FX and colors.
This tutorial can kinda help you learn what the Advanced Palette Editor looks/works like https://mugenguild.com/forum/topics/use-fighter-factory-3-make-palette-fast-177794.0.html
But mainly, you need to learn how to use the eye dropper to select the colors you want to edit/dye and then Save that as a new palette and then have that new palette show up in game.
So look at this image

My main palette was 1,1. Your main palette might be 0,0 or 0,1. When you open the Palette Editor it should let you know. Save the new palette as the same Group BUT different Index. Name it something high at first. You might have a palette named, 1,8 and you dont want to overwrite it. So name it 1,32 and rename it later.

You can see the eye dropper in the image I linked. You can also see this Ryu has "stripes" of colors in his palette. Those would be for the different parts of his body. Other characters wont be organized like that, but you may recognize the pattern it's laid out in after a while. 
You can use the eye dropper to select the parts of the body on the sprite in the window, then you can use those sliding bars to dye and brighten or darken the colors.
You can also manually click on the colors in the palette and use ctrl and shift to select multiple colors or deselect individual colors. So if you accidentally grabbed a color from a character's shoes but you only want to edit the skin tone, you can use Right Click to deselect the color. Either by clicking that color on the sprite, or right click the palette.

Once you get your palette in the character, Find out what the last "main" palette number is. Some chars will use palettes 1,1 thru 1,6. So you'd edit your palette's name to 1,7. Then in the Character's Def file, you could edit the first palette to be 1,7 by editing
pal.defaults = 1,2,3,4,5,6
to
pal.defaults = 7,2,3,4,5,6
Save everything and when you select the first palette, you should see your palette!
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Dude01

Re: A Help Topic: How Do You Make Color Palettes for Characters?
#5  April 21, 2025, 04:53:43 pm
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(Sorry for Updating this Topic) Thank You So Much you guys also another question how do you guys make the png work for mugen? like no need for the act.file
Real reason I'm Called "Dude" Cuz I watched Regular Show WOOOOOOAHH
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