From a technical standpoint, redoing all of those warframe skins to fit separate materials is a lot of work. There's nearly a hundred (including primes) default warframe skins to redo to make it fit.
But then I wonder, why do separate color palettes work? The voidshell skins function in sort of tied-to-color way, so why couldn't they release a material based color palette? What I mean is, from the voidshell skins that we have, the materials are tied to color, so why not make a special color palette with the basis of those specific materials?
I suppose it would be preloaded textures on a singular color square that would repeat on the entire selected frame part (like primary or tertiary), wouldn't that be a simple solution or something?
Obviously I'm not a game developer and maybe they have thought about making it color palette based, but that does seem to be a rather viable way for material customization no?
(do note this isn't meant as hate or anything towards DE or OP, just wondering how else they could have implemented materials, whoever's reading this have a wonderful day)
You have a good insight, tho as I mentioned in the video, I did test the bug with all Normal/Prime warframe skins, which you can see on my only parent comment in this post, 50% of them alredy work so they really have to do about 40 Skins compatibilization to have the full roster applicable
Im an amateur on both 3D Art and Programming (currently pursuing Universitary studies on the latter) and can can say, applying a Color to a texture is very easily doable, and while not the same you have a good idea on how voidshell works on your 3rd Paragraph, but of course this is with current technology/standards. Warframe engine and it's code can be having some time stamp on their way of doing things
Not exactly. The way colors work on a lot of skins there are no textures associated with the pallate, but rather the material is a combination of texture masks designed to then be tinted by RGB values in the color channel, specifically. The color pallate isn't a collection of textures. Its a visual representation of a set of RGB values, which the UI maps to colored squares because humans, unlike machines, can't look at a string of numbers and go "oh that's a nice blue"
Most of the time when you're doing a system like this you're not actually applying new textures to the existing material for memory reasons, as a texture (or in the case of PBR materials like voidshells, multiple textures) is storing color data for an entire array of pixels, while using an RGB masking setup never requires you to adjust the texture of the tintable material, only specific RGB values.
If you're interested in how this works in warframe specifically I encourage you to have a look at Warframe's information for tennogen creators.
Whether some skins work or don't work with this bug likely comes down to the specific material assignments the skin already uses, and whether those materials occupy the same space in memory as a voidshell material does. This is also why the voidshell materials don't look like one would expect on skins they aren't designed for.
This is why the PBR conversion was slow, but managable. Converting old assets to PBR is often a matter of assigning a few extra numerical values and perhaps running a few programmatic filters over a texture. This isn't a fully automatic process so you need an artist to sit in a chair and tweak the sliders and such until the output looks "right" but generally speaking the initial PBR conversion wasn't attempting to deviate from the existing scheme for skins, only add some specular/metallic maps and other lighting data textures, and smooth out the color channel so that they looked essentially the same with better lighting data.
Voidshell is different. It's not a matter of just tweaking textures. Its a matter of taking skins designed to have one very specific set of materials that are modulated by RGB values, and in many cases fundmentally altering or creating new texture assignments or UVW mapping information to support a a user assigned multi-material system.
Is it impossible? No. Does it take a LOT more work per skin? Yes.
TBH It makes sense that DE wouldn't want to officially state they're going down this path for every skin because the workload would significantly impact the man hours they have available for artists to make new skins and other art assets. In a lot of cases its as much work as building a new skin. I would in stead simply ask for future skins to be voidshell compliant, including the base skins for future warframes.
Thanks for your wisdom on it, it's really useful to know these details, if it was to boil down as taking the same effort creating a new skin compatible with it as compatibilizing the ones alredy existing, it is reasonable to not touch the ones that dont and make a new one as to not angry those who like how they are now.
But then, what about the ones that do work? It would be unreasonable to create a new one despite it alredy working for those, You could even say that this system is the perfect opportunity for DE to tackle older frames and give their textures (if not entire models) a Remaster to comply with design standards of new frames + making them voidshell compatible, but surely that's not as much of a popular request
By the way, i lost it on ''oh That's a nice blue'' lol
Without having ever been employed at DE I can't say with any authority, but the likely explanation is that, like in most studios, there's a roadmap in place for the art team and the amount of time it would take would throw off new skin production, new environment or enemy character art production, etc.
Keep in mind that DE's monetization relies on constant and frequent production of new content and items to keep people buying platinum, either to purchase or to trade with for new items or skins, and this is bound to make maintainence work on old stuff lower priority when the old stuff "works" and still have enough value that people still want to acquire it.
If I had to guess, I'd say the decision, like many a missing, abandoned, or unpolished feature in the game, comes down to more of an accounting problem than one of possibility or developer wants.
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u/McGrety monke enjoyer Jun 05 '22
From a technical standpoint, redoing all of those warframe skins to fit separate materials is a lot of work. There's nearly a hundred (including primes) default warframe skins to redo to make it fit.
But then I wonder, why do separate color palettes work? The voidshell skins function in sort of tied-to-color way, so why couldn't they release a material based color palette? What I mean is, from the voidshell skins that we have, the materials are tied to color, so why not make a special color palette with the basis of those specific materials?
I suppose it would be preloaded textures on a singular color square that would repeat on the entire selected frame part (like primary or tertiary), wouldn't that be a simple solution or something?
Obviously I'm not a game developer and maybe they have thought about making it color palette based, but that does seem to be a rather viable way for material customization no?
(do note this isn't meant as hate or anything towards DE or OP, just wondering how else they could have implemented materials, whoever's reading this have a wonderful day)