Re: [GD-General] software for artwork

[Mickael P. <mpo...@ed...>]

Javier Arevalo wrote:
> Mickael Pointier <mpo...@ed...> wrote:
>
>> Aura is more in the paint box category, while Pro Motion is the
>> spiritual successor of Deluxe Paint, and is particularly good for
>> clut based picturing (GBA and PS2)
>
> Kind of changing topic here, but I'm curious... are manual
> palettization and pixel-drawing common in PS2 developement? You had
> to do it sometimes on the PS1, but I'm surprised it is still the case
> on the PS2, I expected most palettes to be generated from rgb
> images/textures.

For most pictures, you are right, but we had trouble finding a good
algorithm to generate picture in 256 colors, using a 32 bit ARGB clut,
specially when the alpha channel is used.

Standard quantization algorithms create artefacts, but thats not visually to
disturbing when applied to color components, surprisingly if you extend
these algorithm to 4d, the final result is really, really crappy...

I think the reasons are multiples, the first beeing that when A tend toward
0, you do not really care about the true values of RGB components (they are
almost invisible at this point), so a lot of colors are used in semi
translucent tints, that could have been used in nearly opaque areas.

So, we had some graphist that some time to time on critical bitmaps create
cluts by hand, and remap the 32bits bitmap using that particular clut...


    Mike