colors!

Customization is very near and dear to both Brian's and my own heart, so it's no surprise that a high level of customization is a big goal of ours in ZeroGear. While Brian has been working on our physics and camera system, I had some time to play with Ogre's material system. After a little bit of poking around I developed a system to let us have user-customizable color on most anything we wish. After implementing it on most of our existing assets I spent a while time trying out different color combinations. Here are a compilation of some straight out of the Ogre model viewer.

I start out by making sure that all the areas that are going to be re-colored in the material system are desaturated. Things that are not going to change color (such as the tail lights or mud splatters in this example) remain full color.



Then I make a solid white color mask of the parts of the texture I am going to be filling with an RGB value. Then in the material file I tell the engine to fill the mask color with the desired color and then combine it with the black and white base texture.



We will hook up a color picker widget in the game gui to supply the material with whatever color the user wishes to use for his kart or character or other accessories.