Choosing Colors for Scenery Editors?

[Philster]

How do you map makers decide on choosing proper colors for your maps? To me, one of the most important aspects of any map is the color pallet, I find this one of the hardest things to achieve with ysflight.

This question came mostly after I saw VNAF's work, shown here.
The colors are pretty much spot on and I want to able to do the same thing.

[VNAF ONE]

Well honestly, I always save a new color when I make one. It's pretty important. It takes a lot of playing around with the color palette. What you could try is use a satellite image overlay.

Cool trick I've learned. When you use a satellite overlay, it is a bit dim. First, get a good ground color working, one that will be good for the whole map. I can spend 10-15 minutes trying to get that right alone. Once you've figured that, find the colors for a runway or something. Usually, some shade of grey is fine. When you put a polygon, such as a runway, down on the overlay, if the color is right, it will look just like it should. I hope my explanation is understandable. If not, observe:


Notice the darker green areas are where I've input a polygon with a dark green representing trees. You can also see the areas where I have not put anything down yet besides the ground color. When you have the correct color, it should highlight the area and make it come to life. The colors aren't perfect, but as you can see, they get down to the point. You will always have to adjust colors when you have a different scenery. If I go to Nellis and try the same color for trees, it may not work there because of the environment.

I have a huge collection of colors at my disposal and I tend to recycle them a lot, which when I release some new maps, you might notice the same colors. These colors are like my fingerprint, my signature. I would like to share them, but I feel that it is better when someone can make their own colors. It's like artwork and everyone will have their personal touch.

All in all, what you should do is develop your own colors and most importantly, SAVE THEM. Back them up, do not lose them because they will save you hours of time and effort. Always expand your collection. If you get stumped, you can go to a similar map, pick up color, and then save it, modify it, and use it. The internet can also provide you RGB and HEX codes that you can use. Scenery editor does not translate HEX codes so use something like paint to get your RGB values.

Hope this helps

[Gunny]

Since the majority of my maps are of actual place on the earth I us the google maps as a guide to ground colors.Taking into account the seasons of course.But the one season I have not tackle yet is early fall.All the bright changing leaf colors has are difficult to reproduce with out looking like the Ginza at midnight due to the color reproduction of my graphics card.But I keep to muted earth tones most of the time and keep my building elevation grids to low impact colors of shades of grey except for reflective surfaces like glass and chrome or if a particular airport has distinctive colors for hangars or offices.Oh and another point save your color palates in scenery editor for future use so as not to keep trying to match colors all the time.Save them for summer,spring and winter or for any specialized areas you will be repeating.

[waspe414]

I generally have Google Earth, or screenshots of it, open in an image editor so it's not transparent and I can grab colours. Sometimes I'll look at actual photos from the air or on the ground (which are particularly useful for getting water right), and I'll grab an area I want and average the colour to one pixel to give me a good starting point for that particular grass or forest. Then I mess around with it in Scenedit and YS so it looks good and captures the essence of the place I'm making.

[VNAF ONE]

Forgot to mention, but keep in mind that sometimes ys can make your organic colors look weird so you might have to mess around with them in flight to see what they'll look like in YS. It usually tends to make them look brighter so you may have to take some contrast and brightness out of them to get a more organic color.

[Gunny]

Speaking of looking different the colors of D3D will look different than opengl so if the user uses both platforms they will notice a difference in tones.But unfortunately there is nothing to be done for it.And one more suggestion.If you are not conversant with RGB codes as I am not experimentation is the way to go to match colors.And I can attest as wasp414 noted that having a photo open out of scenery editor is a big help in matching colors as the reference photo will be faded when imported into scenery editor.

[Turbofan]

^What everyone above said. And I basically started experimenting with colours using the colour palette, but when I first started out map making, I used PatrickN's "Treatise on the Creation of Maps" as a guide for different colours, like concrete, green spaces (parks, forests, etc) and oceans/seas and adapted them to my own liking. Nowadays, even though all my sceneries are fictional, I still place them alongside real-world places, so I use Google maps to pick the best-match coour for oceans, green areas etc. Experimenting is the best way to getting comfortable with RGB values.

[decaff_42]

I have a program (It Comes with my Mac!!!! WOOO MAC~~~!) that allows you to pick up on-screen colors. It has a variable size aperature that averages the colors out inside of it, allowing me to really get good average colors of what I'm targeting.

It's called DigitalColor Meter, and it works like a charm. a lot of my blender colors comes from this handy tool!