Perfectly working Paper Mario textures. An explanation for texture designers.

[Gonetz]

This information is for texture designers, who work on Paper Mario retexturing.
As you know, textures for most, if not all personages in this game have 4bit CI format. Color indexed textures have two main features: they are smaller in size than RGBA textures, and the same texture will look different with different palettes. The second feature is very important here.
Rice format allows you to use two different ways to create hi-res counterparts for CI textures. The first way - create png texture for each combination of texture-palette. The second way - use palletized BMP, which uses original N64 palette. Texture designers usually select the first way, may be because in this case they are not limited in color selection. However, for this game, if you want to create hi-res character's texture, which will work correct in all situations, you must use the second way - CI BMP! Why? Read further.
The game uses interesting technique, which we call "2D lighting" ((c) Orkin). In dark places, if your character(s) is near source of a light, part of character's sprite, facing to the sources, is highlighted. The closer character to the light source, the more of it is highlighted, and highlighting is brighter. How it works? The game dynamically generates special palette, creates auxiliary texture by using character's CI texture with this palette, and blends main and auxiliary textures together.
RiceVideo does not emulate this effect, so texture designers could ignore it - characters were black anyway. Now you have the alternative. Glide64 emulates this game nearly perfect. New GlideHQ supports it also pretty well. However, "2D lighting" will not correctly work with png textures. Since auxiliary palettes generated dynamically, no way to dump them all for all characters and all light sources. However, if you will use CI BMP, everything should work just fine. Good luck!

 

[Shin_Gouki]

make it sticky!

 

[Terranigma]

This is very useful information! Awesome job finding it!

 

[Legend]

I take it there's nothing that can be done with existing packs? Has to be completely redone from the begining?

 

[Gonetz]

Not completely. Only textures for personages and some enemies.

 

[kdubya]

It would only take like a 4 line script using imagemagick to convert the hi res pngs to hi res ci bmps. You could just rip the color pallete from the original bmp, which is simple because they have the same filename as the bmps. There would be problems if there was not a decent match for each color in the color pallete, but if of the packs are just high res versions of the same textures it shouldnt really be a problem. Im sure you could do it with a photoshop script too.

 

[ggab]

yes kdubya, that sounds like a great idea to use and modify existing packs



thnks Gonetz for the important tip to fix paper mario's issue

 

[ggab]

i'll quote a very great advice from KoolSmoky:

Originally Posted by Legend
1) There are white borders around some of the hi-res textures. You see it alot on text. This happens with any setting in the HQ tab. Occurs on all tested games so far. Text on PM and S&P, icons on SM64, etc. With Rice's, this does not happen. See screenshot for an example with Glide64.

There are two reasons why you see white borders. See attached image.

1. The original texture was intensionally designed to have borders. Let's take for example, the icon with mario's face. The hires textures used are, SUPER MARIO 64#580E00A9#0#2_rgb.png and _a.png. The former holds the RGB channels, the latter alpha. The gfx hardware receives the merged result and it has borders.

2. Badly designed textures. Take the power meter for example. If you look at SUPER MARIO 64#6CA78364#0#2_all.png, there is color padding in transparent areas, which is good, because the design is robust to the slight difference in blending implementations. Now take a look at SUPER MARIO 64#4DC0BBDF#0#2_all.png, there is no color padding and some parts are just painted white. This results in anomalies such as borders, etc. Surely this isn't the job done by the same texture designer.

Note that black is used to represent full transparency for the A channel in the examples shown in the attached image.

Texture designers must adapt the robust design shown in attach. In fact, it's common practice to pad the transparent area's rgb channels with the same color or pattern as the edge of the opaque area among the professionals. All textures that show borders does not follow this, excluding the ones that are intended to have borders. Examine the color channels of the textures with a decent image editor such as GIMP and see for yourself.

-KoolSmoky

 

[MuhMuh]

I get the white corners on my Majora's Mask textures in GlideHQ... So does that mean I have to redo all them?

 

[nmn]

Actually, if I properly understood what is trying to be explained, not always. If you know how to color pad yourself, you can do that. The game may not be entirely affected by the white edges in Rice though... If it is, then you'll probably want to pad textures yourself.

 

[Legend]

I get the white corners on my Majora's Mask textures in GlideHQ... So does that mean I have to redo all them?

Not really. Make sure the "Use Alpha channel fully" option is unchecked. That option was introduced in like "Update 3" I think (gets rid of the white border junk).

But for the future, hopefully designers will keep this in mind.