Been encountering problems trying to fit custom palettes into some of the more complex sprites. I’m extremely new (about 4 days ago ish) to this so I was wondering if anyone had any tips?
Was recommended using FE recolor but It’s a little confusing to me having almost 0 experience with such programs.
For an example: using the Greil animation (credit to Cipher Lee, DerTheVaporeon, and Nuramon for this. It’s amazing!)
And trying to give it a custom Palette for Raven’s use using his portrait colors…but this is as close as I can get lol FeelsBadMan
Any tips would be very appreciated! I know I ask a lot of questions here so hopefully I’m not annoying yet lol
I’ve not used FE Recolor personally, so unsure how difficult it is, but I find FEBuilder’s palette editor to be pretty straightforward to work with and export/import with.
I used to be daunted by palettes and only recently started to get more comfortable with them. It takes time and practice to feel more confident.
My advice would be to experiment with each shade to see what they impact. Some sprites have weird overlap, where different parts use the same shade (like faces having the same color as a weapon, for example). Experimentation here to figure out what does what is important.
I also recommend mimicking the same sort of color ramp (difference between shades), but adjust to your liking. It’ll help it maintain a similar feel that the vanilla palette has. Keep in mind the differnces between each of the shades and mirror that as you adjust individual colors to your liking.
For the sprite you shared, I’d recommend increasing the ramp between shades and also decrease saturation of each color. You can do this by adding more of other colors to make them a bit more faded or washed out. Take a look at vanila palettes for ideas on what this looks like.
Someone more technical or artistic may be able to give a better answer, but hope this helps you get started!
Just at a glance, it looks like you’ve got some colors flipped (hair and cape have the dark where the light should be and vice versa), and you’ve got the same shade doubled once in the cape’s ramp and once in the sword/pauldron/greaves’ color ramp, which is lowering the amount of detail on the sprite. That would be where I would concentrate first and then try to go from there.
Changing a single pixel in a sprite can sometimes cause it to look very different, so just making these tweaks might vastly change how you feel about the palette on the sprite.
Yeah the overlap is part of what I’m having trouble with. Thats where the purple and yellow in the sword come from lol. I’d love to separate the arms and hair, so they arent red. But I’m not even sure if thats possible. I appreciate the feedback!
Yeah, a lot of trouble comes from palette’s overlapping. Which I understand it was made for that palette specifically and not necessarily meant for others. I appreciate that link though, I’ll give it a look when I get more time
I don’t know of any way faster for this than manually editing every frame in the animation to change what color from the palette you want the desired area to be. Could probably do the old Eraser method from the Paint days since you would at least have some control over what colors you’re changing without changing every instance of that color swatch (or some combination of Magic Wand select and then unselecting portions you didn’t want to change if your graphics editor supports this) and this would avoid manually changing each and every pixel…
Yeah sounds pretty painful but tbh I like Raven and this animation enough to try. A mix of the armored hero and his original coat would be cool but I am no animator. I’d just re-palette those but the armored doesnt fit him at all and I dislike the sword for him. And his original just has that plain shield and sword lol
I want to share a custom palette as a resource that can be used free.
If you have great data, you should export the image of FEBuilderGBA’s Custom Palette and share it.
This is the red (pink) dragon master I made.
There are several ways to create a custom palette.
Use the color difference creation function of FEBuilderGBA.
Right-click on the palette to display the menu.
You can use this to easily create different color characters.
Problem.
Currently FEBuilderGBA cannot undo palettes.
Palette change fails and Ctrl + Z does nothing.
This is not good, so I hope to fix it.
However, you can undo endlessly if you use another software.
Press the Export Image button and edit with palette-recognizable graphic software.
Oh wow holy crap lol thanks a lot man. This will certainly be helpful. I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the wild things FE builder can do I suppose. Good work!
btw Full credit to @ltranc for coming in clutch with these Raven palettes. Still not exactly as I want it, but much more would be pretty difficult without doing what has been suggested here in this thread I think and they’re pretty epic.
