Every day Driver: Channelling RGB into 1-bit

After efficiently splitting out darkish and mild parts of the sprites and rendering them in a HDR vogue, I figured: why cease there? Perchance I could squeeze but any other colour into the render – some explicit colour of grey – that I could tackle in a assorted manner to introduce dithered areas to the sprite.

This came together in a instant time but it resulted in my Makefile, all over as soon as more, turning into too complex. So I inch to rethink my potential.

If easiest there was a potential to encode info about three assorted colours in a single bitmap image. Hang on a minute, there already is: RGB!

Channels

So my recent notion was to utilize red, inexperienced and blue as the colors for my render, then prick up the image into those colour channels and course of every personally to get separate mild, darkish and dithered parts.

The use of imagemagick it is easy to separate a single channel from an image:

magick render.png -channel G -separate inexperienced.png

From this clear-prick originate things instant change into more complex. I repeatedly catch building imagemagick commands a extraordinarily time drinking course of. Certainly, it took me a truly long time to advance at a workflow that was simply simply. Nonetheless I mediate it as time smartly-spent as this could lead to grand sooner and more straightforward iterations when designing vehicles.

Total, I did about a more systems:

• threshold convert the channels to 1-bit colour
• apply a dither sample to the inexperienced channel
• composite accumulate layers support together as the last image

And the technique worked a tackle!

The resulting workflow takes half as long to originate as my outdated workflow, with all vehicles rendering in ~8 minutes in contrast with ~16 minutes earlier than that.

Here are some instance hello-res photographs showing the jog from initial render to last composite: