Making masked textures fast Created 12 years ago2011-12-28 22:23:00 UTC by zeeba-G

I used photoshop to select the background of an image by color select and deleted it. Then I place it over a blue background and merge the layers. Then I copy and paste it into paint and re copy and paste it into wally to make it a masked texture. Wally then brakes the blue color sample up into many blue color samples making the image not masked because the bottom right color sample must be the one defining the blue masked area. Is there any quick way around this ie. to make wally not do this so that I don't have to re paint bucket in every masked area?

Hip hip, hurray! Thanks m8! Damn water mark, I was gonna steal that!

.. and if your palette is already messed up (i.e. the background blue is 0, 0, 255, but its index isn't 255), use the translate colors tool in Wally (Colors > Translate Colors), which lets you swap color indexes quickly.

It's a total lifesaver in some situations.

K ill check it out. In ps when I make the mode set to index colors it doesn't make one color sample the blue one but many.

That shouldn't matter, but you can always use any random bright color for the BG before indexing the image. Then you can change the 255 index to blue and fill in the BG with it.

You'll also want to clean up the anti-aliasing of the transparent object before indexing. That usually forces a bunch of unused blues into your palette.

Yea that's what i was trying to avoid. It lookes like when Archie did his it only created one blue color index.

Zeeba, if you're getting many different blues, there are a few work arounds.

I usually put my pure blue on a layer above. Paint with the pixel brush where the blue is, and then paint the texture underneath that. If the texture is ABOVE the blue, you can get slight off-blue valued pixels that will show up on the Index.

If there are a few blues on the index anyway like 3 or 4, cancel the conversion to 8bit and collapse your layers, select all, and copy the image. Convert to 8bit and open the palette. Change the last color to blue no matter what color is already there and the duplicate blues to black or white or whatever. Click OK. Paste the copied image. The pasted image will look proper because when you paste stuff in PS into a color index image, the colors will reorganize to match as closely as possible. This will fix any off-blue values, and the colors that may have messed up from playing with the palette.

The best way to extract a mask is to use the first method with the above layer of blue and pixel brush.

If you have more blue indexes it's probably because your image has undergone compression at some point. This happens if you save it as a JPEG or take it through MSPaint.

Ok awesome, thanks. Yes I always copy and paste into paint first bc it formats it for wally. Guess I should avoid this as well.

If you set it to indexed colour in Photoshop you won't need to take it through Paint.

I've managed to set it to RGB from Indexed and wally doesn't mess with it , works perfectly fine in Half life.
The whole 255th index thing seems completely pointless

wally only works with indexed bitmaps. if you import any other image format it converts it to indexed bmp and its method of doing so is terrible. It'll make textures grainier and lose colour information. If you've managed to get a non-indexed image to work as a transparent texture after wally has converted it then it was a total fluke.

Nice Archie! Should code this up an add it to tutorial section, since it seems lots of people(myself included) have trouble with these.

but official tutorials don't have wacky angled screenshots :3

If they weren't angled it clearly wouldn't have made any sense.