Vaarn Color Palette

[Gulluth]

The main goal to creating these tiles is to have a tool set that creates a unified look for maps created by VoV referees and content creators. The question that needs to be answered is what kind of look are we going for? The current palette is based on rkbv-ii with a few extra monochrome colors added. While this palette is excellent, I found the lack of greens, yellows, purples, and browns to be limiting. Limits can be good, as it can push your creative boundaries. I do worry, though, that with a lack of colors it will limit the variety of tiles that can be created. My hope is that this repository will eventually include tiles for ruins, caves, vaults, and other interiors, hex overworld tiles as well, each with their own look and style.

This bug report is meant as a dialog, as there are not any actionable items yet, however the hex tiles and grid tiles are not currently unified, and need to be updated once progress to the color palette are finalized.

[bughunterstudios]

I thought it would be interesting to test this color palette by modifying one of my Vaults Of Vaarn renders to use only colors from the palette. Though the piece was not designed with these colors in mind, I think the results are pretty good.

[Gulluth]

What an excellent way to test a color palette, the image on the right does look good which is surprising due to the limited number of colors. I am really impressed that blender can change palettes like that, how long do these scenes take to render?

[bughunterstudios]

Sadly I couldn't do it very easily in Blender. So instead I opened the original image in Gimp, posterized it down to around 20 colors, and then manually filled in colors using the palette you created.

In Blender there are two rendering engines. The Eevee engine would be really good for rendering stark contrasting cartoon colors like in the rightmost image, however I rely on the Cycles rendering engine to create those procedural sand dunes. When I switched to Eevee the dunes looked terrible. For other renders without the dunes it should be a lot easier.

This particular scene takes me 6 minutes and 40 seconds to render and denoise at 4400x6300 resolution.

[Gulluth]

I haven't made much progress on this, honestly because I don't feel like I have a good eye for design. I am currently thinking of leaning on my strengths and just use a color palette created for terminal emulators, since that is sort of the look I am going for anyway. Solarized has always been a favorite, and there is a gimp palette in their git repo.

[Gulluth]

I haven't made much progress on this, honestly because I don't feel like I have a good eye for design. I am currently thinking of leaning on my strengths and just use a color palette created for terminal emulators, since that is sort of the look I am going for anyway. Solarized has always been a favorite, and there is a gimp palette in their git repo.

@bughunterstudios has added 3 shades of green to the Vaarn Color Palette that look really great and have been merged into main. The color palette will not be abandoned for solarized, we will continue to create a unique palette for the Vaarn community.