WORKING WITH COLOR LIMITATIONS

One of the primary obstacles and hurdles you run into while painting cars for one of the Papyrus NASCAR games is the EXTREMELY limited number of colors available to work with. The NASCAR palette has just under 150 colors. Why? Why not at least the standard 256 Windows colors? Good question, and here's the answer.

Each track in NASCAR3 contains up to 256 colors. Some use more than others, and each track uses some different colors. The 146 colors in the painting palette are the colors that are in EVERY track. I don't know why the folks at Papyrus didn't just throw in all 256 colors somewhere on every track, but they didn't. So we're stuck with the 146 colors that all the tracks have in common. Probably my biggest complaint about the palette is that we don't get TRUE RED, TRUE BLUE, or TRUE GREEN in the palette. The three major colors, and we don't even get the real deal on any of them.

Yeah, I'm still a little bitter. <G> But let's move on.

When you're painting in the N3 Paint Shop, it really doesn't matter what colors you choose. You're not allowed to pick a color that isn't in the palette. However, when painting in Paint Shop Pro you'll be editing in 16 million colors. If you just pick any color of the 16 million colors and paint away, you'll get an error message if you just save the car and import it.

The tutorial I learned from said to load the N3 palette onto each little thing you were importing before you put it on the car. That's one way to go about it, but I prefer to just edit away in 16 million colors and then load the palette when all is said and done. But, you have to keep a few things in mind while you're painting if you're going to do it my way.

I use the 'Load Palette' option under the 'Colors menu' to load the NASCAR color palette. Doing this makes sure that there aren't any colors on your car that won't work in the game. Sounds easy enough, huh? Well, not exactly. There's a little problem you run into. If you just load the palette, save the car, and then try to import, you'll still get a nasty little message that says 'Unable to load .PCX. file has a corrupted palette'. Doggonit! How? We loaded the dang palette, didn't we? Well, yes, we did. The problem is with these little guys that run along the bottom of the car .PCX file:



When you load the palette, these colors get messed up. Don't ask me why, I would think that they couldn't become a color that isn't in the palette when you load the palette. But for some reason N3 doesn't like it when they get messed up, and that's why you get the corrupt palette error. However, just the car area that we painted WILL work, so if we cut out just the car part of the file and paste it on a good .PCX file, It will import just fine. I know, I know. Of all the stupid crap. <G> It's a tortured existence, being a NASCAR painter. Hehe.

Included in your NASCAR3 directory is a selection area file (remember those?) that you can load that is exactly the shape of the paintable areas of the car. Pretty cool, huh?

So, here's what you do.
  1. Once you've loaded the palette, you go to the Selections menu and choose 'Load Selection from disk'.
  2. Then you browse to the Nascar3 folder and open 'car mask.sel'. You'll see the little marching ants appear around the car.
  3. Now, hit CTRL-C to copy the contents of the selected area to the clipboard.
  4. Close the file and DO NOT SAVE. We want to open up the unchanged version (which doesn't have the corrupted color bars along the bottom) and just paste the updated car stuff over top.
  5. Open the same file again, and hit CTRL-E to paste it into the image.
  6. Now line up the newer car stuff over top of the old stuff (pretty easy to do, actually), and once you've got it placed EXACTLY right, go ahead and right-click to paste it down.
NOW you can save the file, and it will import just fine.

    THE COLOR PICKER

If you're just picking and working with colors out of the Paint Shop Pro color chooser, you'll notice that when you load the palette, the car looks considerably different from what it did in all it's 16-million-color glory. The best way to avoid this unpleasant surprise (it NEVER, EVER looks better, I promise ) is to select your colors from this file, the Nascar3 Color Picker:


By using the dropper tool, you can select the colors from this picture instead of from Paint Shop Pro's color chooser. Yes, you're editing at 16 million colors, but if you only work with the colors from here, your car won't change nearly as much when you load the palette. I'll give you an example. Say you want to put a green #16 on your car. If you use the bright green from Paint Shop Pro's color chooser, it will be a drastically different shade of green (not to mention a much uglier shade) when you load the palette. However, if you use the dropper tool and select one of the greens from the N3 color picker, it won't change color when you load the palette. This way you know in advance that you can't have the bright green you want so much, not after all the work on the car is done.

Now, part of the reason we use Paint Shop Pro is because it anti-aliases (smooths) things for us. To do that, it uses colors that aren't in the palette. One thing that can be said for the palette, however, is that for the most part it blends pretty well between most of the major colors. Now, there are some colors that just won't blend very smoothly with the Nascar3 palette, particularly if the blend takes place over more than 2 or 3 pixels. Here's a few of them:
  • Black-Yellow - You get brown in between these two. YUCK!
  • Green-Blue - There just aren't enough intermediate colors between these two.
  • Red-Green - One again, not enough intermediate colors between these two.
  • Yellow-Blue - This one works OK if your blend only takes place over 2 or 3 pixels, but any more than that and the brown crops up again.
  • Dark anything - Dark anything else - If you look at the colors in the palette, there are really only about 10 total dark colors in all the shades combined. For example: If you try to blend from dark blue to black over more than a 3 pixel area, there aren't enough colors to make a smooth blend.
  • Bright Green - I don't care what you try, you will NEVER get bright green (true Green, like THIS) to work out.
So, how do you avoid this kind of severe mis-coloration? How can you tell how something's going to blend without loading the palette every two steps? Well, you get a feel for it after a while. Trial and error (and the list I just gave you) will teach you what colors to keep separated. If you MUST use these colors together, avoid low-angled diagonal lines like the ones below. The picture on the left shows the lines in 16 million colors. The image on the right shows how NASTY they look with the N3 palette loaded:

  

See that ugly brown? The reason it turns out so nasty is that when Paint Shop Pro loads the palette, it checks the Hue/Saturation/Lightness of each pixel. Then it checks the palette you're loading for the color with the closest values for H/S/L, and swaps it in to that pixel. Sometimes, there isn't a color anywhere close to what would make a smooth blend, and the nearest color is WAY off. That's when you get a bad blend.

As you paint more and try different things, you'll get a feel for what you can and can't do. If you keep those things in the front of your mind while you're painting, you'll save yourself a lot of frustration. There's no single thing in car painting more frustrating than developing the coolest design in the world and then loading the palette and having it look like complete crap. If you're careful what colors you use as you work, you'll avoid these major disappointments and avoid wasting a lot of time on them.

Wow, what a pain in the butt, huh? Well, it's well worth it. As long as you plan ahead, be careful what colors you're using, and understand the limitations of the color palette, you'll do just fine.

Now let's talk about the virtues of editing your cars at twice their normal size. Click Here to go to the next lesson.
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