Hey; not 100% sure how to ask this, even.
Can I load a reference image into a palettized sprite, without that reference image then being put into the palette I’m working with?
What I want at the end: a workflow for making old-school Doom / Quake palettized textures … but with support for doing PBR (normal / occlusion / metal / roughness / etc) on additional layers. Think Valheim, with the blocky look but realistic materials… except, using the old-world techniques instead of modern engines.
Can’t have it without a major Lua undertaking; fine.
Can’t support multiple palettes at the moment; fine.
So for now, I am trying to load a finished layer as a reference image for the next layer. Even trying to save out .pngs.
Example flow that I’d like to work:
- make full-color grass texture, using a saved 256 color palette
- export to png (not needed for anything but reference image)
- make new layer with new palette (normals or elevation or emissives)
- load reference .png and have it keep looking like the .png, and not have it converted to “nearest match” within the current palette
- run monstrous Lua script that bundles this all into .WAD files (or exports in some other intermediary format)
Is there any hope, or should I be looking at something like trying to design some method in Lua for dynamically building a massive palette, that takes inputs for albedo / emissive / normals / etc, and then figuring out how to extract the separate palettes / layers, after the fact?