AuthorTopic: Palette cycling is back !  (Read 9814 times)

Offline PypeBros

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Palette cycling is back !

on: July 26, 2010, 05:06:19 pm
May I share this collection of demos with you ?
I  bet most of you know palette cycling animation; HTML5 seems to allow to code them efficiently enough to see a gallery of examples appearing. I must say some of them are pretty impressive.

Have a nice day.

Offline Indigo

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #1 on: July 26, 2010, 06:01:46 pm
just briefly looking over the code i feel like it isn't actually shifting the indexes around in 8-bit, but most likely in 24 bit in real time.  its very impressive.  I'll look into the source code further.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #2 on: July 26, 2010, 06:15:45 pm
I think if you enable blend mode (default) it generates inbetween colours to make stuff smoother. kinda like animated aa. And indeed, this is quite impressive. some clever use of colourcycling.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Ai

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #3 on: July 27, 2010, 03:23:54 am
Beautiful use of dithering (I'm pretty sure it's computer-generated, too, heh) to enable the various subtle cycling effects. the palette's kind of obscenely large, but not surprising really.. I suspect the originals were made with a tool that overlaid color cycling layout onto a base picture

As for the 'blend' animation, that seems to be a simple linear interpolation with wrapping at edges, so yeah, just like subpixel animation.
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Offline Helm

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #4 on: July 27, 2010, 03:36:17 am
Yeah the dither patterns tell the tale, there must be a tool that worked on top of the image.

Offline PypeBros

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #5 on: July 27, 2010, 08:49:04 am
I suspect the originals were made with a tool that overlaid color cycling layout onto a base picture

The author of the website speaks of a home-made converter of (amiga) .LBM files into picture (png) + JSON data (palette cycling info), so I bet the "tool" is deluxe paint ...

Offline Ai

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #6 on: July 27, 2010, 11:27:30 am
I suspect the originals were made with a tool that overlaid color cycling layout onto a base picture

The author of the website speaks of a home-made converter of (amiga) .LBM files into picture (png) + JSON data (palette cycling info), so I bet the "tool" is deluxe paint ...
I quite definitely disagree. Have you looked at the complexity of some of the color cycling patterns? Sure, you could draw them directly onto the picture, but that would make it MUCH harder to do -- if you look at some of the complex water cycling effects, creating them would depend on being able to see each color cycling set distinctly from each other, whereas previewing the animation would require only a subtle contrast (as found in the result). You could do that with palette swapping, but again, this seems to me to be a lot of pain to go to versus simply drawing the cycling flows on the spare page, saving it separately, and combining them using a simple tool.
Though the base image at least was certainly produced in DP, the LBM fileformat was writable by other things than just Deluxe Paint.

(I'm really just going by 'How I would do it' here.. To be fair it may well have been done all via DP.)
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Offline PypeBros

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #7 on: July 27, 2010, 04:32:07 pm
Though the base image at least was certainly produced in DP, the LBM fileformat was writable by other things than just Deluxe Paint.

(I'm really just going by 'How I would do it' here.. To be fair it may well have been done all via DP.)
That could very well be true, yes. And that would be mandatory with the DP2E for DOS I used to have. Since I don't know about the features of later DP IV and DP V on Amiga, I can only imagine that such tricks could have been natively introduced as part of the main deluxe paint package.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #8 on: July 27, 2010, 04:39:06 pm
Depending how sophisticated you use DP I think it could well be done with just that. You could plan a lot of things in the spare frame for example or whatnot.
I don't think it would be impossible.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

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Re: Palette cycling is back !

Reply #9 on: July 27, 2010, 05:06:43 pm
Definitely not impossible, and the artist states he was using Deluxe Paint II for DOS no less. He might have made some personal tools or not, we'd only find out if we facilitated an interview. Is there any interest in that from the userbase, here? I could certainly send out a few e-mails.