Automatic Sprite Rendering

[LapisLazuli77]

A bit of a rarer problem: why are my sprites rendering overly undetailed and washed out/mostly black and white? I have a guess it might have to do with extreme palette compression but I dunno

[Goosifer]

I see this problem with a lot of the folks using the automatic sprite renderer, but it's not the tool exactly.

 

The imported textures from ZT2 mods are designed to be seen in higher resolutions so when they're downscaled to ZT1 size you lose a lot of detail. It tries its best to compensate by blending a lot of the colors together into less pixels and that's how you get a blurry image. Your image looks black and white, but it still has blue and red where they were on the actual texture. They're just getting less pixel space and have been 'merged' with surrounding pixels.

 

You can use Blender compositing nodes to play around with the final render. Box sharpen is a good one to address the blurriness, maybe the RGB tools to mess with the color. It can only get you so far though because again, the original textures imported from Zoo Tycoon 2 were made for higher resolution, and if detail is your main concern then you might need to make your own texture. Simple shapes and colors designed for small sprites usually work best--scaled down you'll see an illusion of detail (which is why I prefer making textures for ZT1 :P). If you've ever seen my hotdog stand, it looks like I added some gradient and texture detail, but it's really just two solid colors. Downscaling and the right lighting did the rest of the work.

[johnztmaster]

I definitely want to double down on what Goosifer said -- it's really smart to make changes to the textures in advance of doing this, imo, as sometimes the level of detail is either lost in translation or can look out of place with the games' native graphics. I'd also say the textures on the native ZT1 animals, especially pre-CC, tended to be a little more flat than the average ZT2 texture.

[(Designer)HENDRIX]

It's a lot whiter than texture downsizing would cause imo. This might be a problem in the post processing nodes or the source texture color space. Haven't seen that before, though.

[lukamas]

I tried everything to correctly render the sprites for an animal for zt1 in this case, a Western/Lowland Bongo, but I keep getting this pixel palette error, I tried converting with the right palette from blender several times, and it gives me these rainbow pixels, how do I fix this, having no luck, I have not modded zt1 in a long time, so how do I fix this?

[(Designer)HENDRIX]

I think rainbow palette means the .pal file can't be found?

[Fern]

I do not know what method you are using but ZT does .pal files differently.

Try reading this and see if you find anything useful.

trying to work out how pal files work for scenery objects

[lukamas]

1 hour ago, Fern said:

I do not know what method you are using but ZT does .pal files differently.

Try reading this and see if you find anything useful.

trying to work out how pal files work for scenery objects

I already found the culprit, thanks for the tips, it was indeed the .pal files, thanks for the tips.

[jbl89]

As for the number of colors - keep in mind that in a ZT1 color palette, you only have about 255 colors. Would need to check, could even be 254.

[Goosifer]

Yeah it’s 255. It’s a shame it doesn’t support the alpha channel..would have solved so many headaches.