Recolorable textures

Information on Picture Formats(Important: I find 'Windows Bitmap' works the best in RCT3).

Index Color: Reduced Color mapping, 8 bit or less. This is used to reduce images to their smallest size. Commonly used for images placed on home pages of the Internet and games. The 256 color pallets are also mapped for best results.

Saturation: One of the three dimensions of color (HSB). Saturation is the measure of the purity of a color or colors from 0% black to 100% for a fully saturated color.

RGB: Red, Green, Blue; the color model of computers. Computer monitors and digital cameras use these colors to create all the colors seen on the monitor and saved in files. Green gives the color green, but is also used for contrast control. RGB as used on a color display monitor is also an emitted color set, which may view differently than when printed. The RGB color model used by emitted imaging devices that allows white to be created by adding all colors, while black is the absence of all colors.

Ok, now that you have a general understanding of how all this works we can get into setting up the textures.

With RCT3 you have upto 3 paint buckets, with the current importer you can choose how many recolorable colors you wish to have. To set up a recolorable texture you need to saturate the texture to one particular color. The 3 different paintbuckets in RCT3 require a particular color to work effectivley.

Above you can see which color saturation is needed for each bucket.

Now we need to find a texture to use. I will use a brick wall I already have and I will set this up on an object that will have this texture. With this object I am making it will involve a wall, a trim and a pathway(I am making a bridge/tunnel) I wont each of these sections to use the brick texture but I wont them sble to be different colors in the game.

First open your texture in Paint(Which you have already made seamless, if necessary).


Then save it as a '256 Color Bitmap'(this is the best format for RCT3).


Now open your texture in a program that has color saturation, any half decent photo editing program should have this. For this I will be using 'Microsoft Digital Image 2006 Standard Edition Editor'. Click adjust color or saturation or whatever your program has your saturation listed under.


A window should pop-up and appear similar to this, obviously different programs will vary.


Now in my case I wish to have the same texture that will be able to be recolorable 3 time on 1 object i.e. the pathway will be one color, the wall will be one color and the trim will be another color. These will use the same texture but will be seperatly recolorable. I set saturation to full(400) and then set depending on the color option, I set thew corressponding color to 50(halfway) the lower this is set the dark it will be in the game. Below you can see the settings for my 3 recolorable textures.


Save these with a corressponding name i.e. red brick wall, blue brick wall, green brick wall. They should now appear similar to this in their save location.


Since you have already built your CS object(if you have'nt do it now and remember 1 group for each color option or each seperate color, you do not need to group the whoe object as the ase exporter groups it all together). Now in the importer when creating the ovl file. Add you different textures.


Now select each one individually and press 'E'(Edit) and select the number of recolorable(this is for the entire object not just the texture, so if I wont to have my object with 3 recolorable then I set all textures to 3 recolorable if I wont 2 then I set all textures to 2 recolorable and so on).


Now simply add your model and add the correct texture to each group, if this is set up correctly the lights should all be green.


Now finish off importing your object as you would usually do and instal it. Once in the game you should be able to adjust the objects colors. If you have a problem of it being to dark or to light then you will have to go back to your image editing program and adjust the saturation etc.


I hope this tutorial is usefull.

Surfingoz
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