Palettes and Dither Patterns
Many old games used reduced color palettes, often due to hardware limitations! For example, the original GameBoy could only display 4 different brightness values, and the SNES could only display 256 colors at once. Games sometimes employed dithering to emulate an increased color depth.
ProPixelizer gives you a set of tools to create reduced color palettes and dither patterns. Both are combined into a texture Look-Up Table (LUT) which is sampled when rendering the object to color grade with minimal overhead.
Dither patterns
ProPixelizer supports 4x4 dither patterns. You can design your own dither pattern by creating a dither pattern asset (Create -> ProPixelizer -> Dither Pattern). The editor will display a 4x4 grid of values, and a preview of how the dither pattern will appear for a smooth monochrome gradient. Each 'value' in the grid ranges from 0 to 16, and shows the 'threshold' at which this pixel in the 4x4 pattern will be enabled. Some example patterns are included (ProPixelizer/Palettes/DitherPatterns).
Color palettes
You can configure your own palettes using a palette asset (Create -> ProPixelizer -> Palette). After configuring the palette, use the 'Generate' button to create a texture LUT that you can use in your ProPixelizer materials.
A number of properties can be configured:
- Source Texture: The texture to sample the set of colors from. The text below will tell you how many colors were identified in the source - these are used for color matching when generating the look up table.
- Color reduction algorithm: The method to use when deciding which colors are most similar. The comparison can be made in RGB-space, HSV-space, or just using the 'value' of the HSV space (which can work well for monochrome palettes in which hue does not matter).
- Dithering: Whether to use a dither pattern.
- Output: Options for generated LUT file name.
