Graphics - how to do player specific colours in blender?

[The Hood]

For anyone that draws vehicles in blender, how do you get these in the renders for use in the .png files?  I know I could just go in GIMP and pixel push every colour til it looks right, but are there any ways of speeding this process up by doing things in blender pre-render?

[vilvoh]

uhmm...my experience says it's easier and faster to add them using GIMP because in Blender, the render result depends on the lights position. So although you paint any object of the scene with any special color from Simutrans pallete, the final color will depend on the amount of light it recieves, therefore you can't ensure you will get exactly what you specified.

A possible solution would be to reduce the specular and mirror colors to avoid shining and reflections, and get a plain color or even make the object shadeless. In that case, it appears completly white and is not affected by the amount of light it recieves, but you still may give it color (special color)

[VS]

Since special colour also in a different way depends on shading - you should do the minimal shading within range of available special colours - this is probably not a good idea.

So yes, you can't easily avoid postprocessing. The best way is to automate everything to death, so that you can just press a few buttons and the machine does all for you... i imagine it could go like this:

1) make something that marks an area as player-coloured already in blender and allows second render with only that area visible (everything else black?)
2) find some automated way of reducing palette (imagemagick?)
3) mask over normally rendered image and that with postprocesed colours

...or anything else. Maybe there is some way to restrict something to a few palette items in Blender... who knows. I don't touch it

[The Hood]

Thanks for the replies so far - I was wondering if it is sensible to render a vehicle in, say, green, and then auto-replace all green bits with player colour palette in GIMP?  How many colours are available for player colours, and where can I find the hex-codes for them?

[Combuijs]

You mean this one?:

http://en.wiki.simutrans.com/index.php/Special_Colors

[VS]

I can has one wit numbarz too!
http://graphics.simutrans.com/displayimage.php?album=8&pos=16