Help with ICON and FLEXICOLOR (Blender)
- Thread starter Helena
- Start date
Look up rendering in your 3D app. I guess the icon can be something like 256^2 or 128^2 pixels, with transparency.
I've not yet used flexi color myself, but as I understand it:
It is a black/white mask (it requires the texure of your mesh to be 90% white, not pure white, so the colors are applied without color contamination from underlying color in the texture). Black is protected from custom colors, white is what will be possible to color.
In the sample below I have a train I modeled a few months ago, complete with the texture/color scheme. If I wanted to make this usable in Planet Coaster I would have to make the blue and red parts 90% white, and then make up the masks for the respective colors to make up the F1 and F2 masks.
I've not yet used flexi color myself, but as I understand it:
It is a black/white mask (it requires the texure of your mesh to be 90% white, not pure white, so the colors are applied without color contamination from underlying color in the texture). Black is protected from custom colors, white is what will be possible to color.
In the sample below I have a train I modeled a few months ago, complete with the texture/color scheme. If I wanted to make this usable in Planet Coaster I would have to make the blue and red parts 90% white, and then make up the masks for the respective colors to make up the F1 and F2 masks.
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That's a good explanation of flexicolors. I wanted to add a couple notes - first is that the order of the Flexicolors does matter - F1 will be applied first, F2 on top of it, etc. This allows you to do blended colors as well, as your flexicolor maps can have greyscale values. Like so:
Butterfly base color (there's color for the body, but it's a little hard to see. The wings are entirely 90% grey (Butterfly_Monarch_BC):
Flexicolor #1 (Butterfly_Monarch_F1):
Flexicolor #2, with greyscale to allow for blending (Butterfly_Monarch_F2):
For the icon, I've just been doing a transparent PNG file at 128 x 128, and using PNG-8 (256 color) format, as the file size tends to be significantly smaller than PNG-24 (supports up to 16 million colors). In Blender, I make a render with the world ambient color turned all the way up to white (and sometimes add a little lighting on the model if it needs extra). I then screenshot it with the Snipping Tool, open in Photoshop, and select and remove the background. (I'm not really familiar with graphics programs other than Photoshop to give guidance, unfortunately)
I believe removing the background is only technically relevant for grid-based pieces, as the grid will then show up in the background, but it seems to be a good habit to get into anyway.
Butterfly base color (there's color for the body, but it's a little hard to see. The wings are entirely 90% grey (Butterfly_Monarch_BC):
Flexicolor #1 (Butterfly_Monarch_F1):
Flexicolor #2, with greyscale to allow for blending (Butterfly_Monarch_F2):
For the icon, I've just been doing a transparent PNG file at 128 x 128, and using PNG-8 (256 color) format, as the file size tends to be significantly smaller than PNG-24 (supports up to 16 million colors). In Blender, I make a render with the world ambient color turned all the way up to white (and sometimes add a little lighting on the model if it needs extra). I then screenshot it with the Snipping Tool, open in Photoshop, and select and remove the background. (I'm not really familiar with graphics programs other than Photoshop to give guidance, unfortunately)
I believe removing the background is only technically relevant for grid-based pieces, as the grid will then show up in the background, but it seems to be a good habit to get into anyway.