ShiraiJunichi wrote:But if you encourage artists to only adjust the lightness in order to shade, then it should work perfectly every time- as long as the image only has one color besides black and white. This is perfect for hair and eyes- which is what I think altering the hue would be most used for. But if you could create different layers for every color in a single article of clothing, then you could have complete control over all the colors- which would be really nice. It just requires a little thought before hand to do this, I think
I think this is fundamentally right. But of course, the question is, will artists be willing to give over that bit of control in order to make their stuff be automatically colorable. This is compounded by the fact that I've been working in the HSL colorspace, and not the HSV colorspace supported by most applications... So I'm not sure how well it would work with HSV-drawn images.
My gut feeling is that we will need to work around this somehow, if we want to allow people to mess with the non-hue dimensions of the colorspace... needed, for example, to turn blue eyes into brown eyes.
Although I'm not an expert on color-systems, I do have a little experience of them from some of the graphics courses I took. It would be nice to get comments from artistic types on what they think of this.
Hm... Other thoughts. For each doll, images will be organized in a 3-step hierarchy.
Categories are the outermost step in the heirarchy. They serve to group layers logically, into categories like Hair, Eyes, Mouth, Clothes, whatever... Just for the convenience of the user who wants to find such a thing. It may be a property of each category that determines if one or more than one layer will be on at a time.
Layers are what the user turns on and off. A layer may represent a particular hair or eye style. A layer consist of one or more images.
Images correspond to images that can be shown or turned off. Each image has a z-ordering. So it's possible to have one image in a layer in front of a character's face, and one behind. (Useful for hair.)
Hue manipulation occurs on defined subgroups of the images in a layer.
Going with the Kanon example above, Ayu's PJs would be in the category "Clothes". The PJs would be a layer. The PJs layer consists of three images... one of the PJs behind her neck, one of the PJs in front of her body, and one of the buttons. The former two would be in one hue group, the latter would be in a second hue group.
I'm going to suggest that we standardize on a set of licenses for dolls, perhaps on the Creative-Common licenses. The tool could track the licenses, and also who the credit belongs to, so that people can be credited properly.
Hm... Anyone want to suggest a name for this? (I was playing around with ABDC (AB's Doll Creator), but decided that unduly emphasises my efforts, which will hopefully be more than matched by artists.) I'd like to change the name of this thread to be more accurate, as the word warez really irks me.