Creating palette .blp textures?

[FiftyTifty 2]

I was reading through the texture docs over on Wowdev (https://wowdev.wiki/BLP), and found an interesting feature; some of the .blp textures used by WoW are in fact palette textures. But there was no elaboration or detail, so I've a couple questions.

1. By palette texture, is that the version where the texture is referencing colours from a master list of colours? Like old games such as Fallout 1, and Ultima Online; the texture references colours by an indexed palette?

2. If so, how do we make use of these? Create our own palettes, and our own textures that reference a palette?

[Furioz 32]

On 1/19/2022 at 3:38 AM, FiftyTifty said:

I was reading through the texture docs over on Wowdev (https://wowdev.wiki/BLP), and found an interesting feature; some of the .blp textures used by WoW are in fact palette textures. But there was no elaboration or detail, so I've a couple questions.

1. By palette texture, is that the version where the texture is referencing colours from a master list of colours? Like old games such as Fallout 1, and Ultima Online; the texture references colours by an indexed palette?

2. If so, how do we make use of these? Create our own palettes, and our own textures that reference a palette?

To be honest i'm only sort of following what you are saying. But I believe wow does not use a colour palette. These .blp textures are converted .png files, you can easy convert one of these blp's with blpconverter's found on this website or install blpview to see these files in your windows explorer.

For particle's , some of the particles do use rgb codes to create particle colors.

For example this cape uses this texture:
https://www.wowhead.com/item=152154/gilded-seraphs-drape?bonus=3612:1475



And to create one of these texture files, is pretty "simple". If you know how to draw these you can make one yourself, although I am not much of a designer. But there are easy ways to recolor the blizzard blp and make items have an entirely different look.

As for example the warglaives

[FiftyTifty 2]

5 hours ago, Furioz said:

To be honest i'm only sort of following what you are saying. But I believe wow does not use a colour palette. These .blp textures are converted .png files, you can easy convert one of these blp's with blpconverter's found on this website or install blpview to see these files in your windows explorer.

For particle's , some of the particles do use rgb codes to create particle colors.

And to create one of these texture files, is pretty "simple". If you know how to draw these you can make one yourself, although I am not much of a designer. But there are easy ways to recolor the blizzard blp and make items have an entirely different look.

As for example the warglaives

There are several different formats for .blp textures. Several are just bog standard DDS DXTC formats, but one of them is to use an indexed colour palette of 256 colours. This vastly reduces texture size, at the cost of a limited number of colours in the texture itself.

My question is, how do we make those indexed .blp textures?

[Amaroth 549]

Palletized textures are used for textures applied directly to character models. Item "texturecomponents". Chest, gloves, legs, boots, wrists, belt. Not sure if they are also used for the character skin textures themselves as well, but iirc, yes. How to make them - open PNG in Photoshop, palletize it in it to 256 colors, convert to BLP, done. Or use BLP convertor's GUI feature which palletizes the PNG as part of the conversion, iirc there is some button in ribbon for "clothing textures" or something of sorts.