How do you isolate objects on a texture using a shader?

Unity Engine
1

I would like to allow the player to use a color swatch to control different parts of an outfit piece’s colors.

For example, if there is a pair of pants witch flames up the side, i’d like the player to have a color picker for the pants, and a different one for the flames, allowing them to customize both tints separately.

How should I go about preparing the texture for the pants if this is the case? Should there be 2 textures and then they are combined using a shader? For example: a pants texture and a flames texture? Does that mean the flame’s texture must have alpha where it doesn’t have flames so it can be pasted over the pants texture well?

2

If the geometry allows to isolate the flames from the pants in another material then you could have two materials (one for pants and one for flame) while having only one texture. So the pants and flame on the same texture but the pants and flame have different materials.

The other way is to use a shader that has color mask RGB. Here too you can have your pants and flame be part of only one texture. Also the geometry doesn’t matter here as you don’t need to isolate the pants from the flames in this case so you can use only one material.

So you do the texture normally and don’t worry about the change of colors at this point.

Then you make a color mask (red green blue) texture where each of these colors dictates which part of the texture will change color. (example of what color masks looks like can be found here. The example is from the game : the sims. http://www.thesimsresource.com/resources/view/category/creating-sims3-texturing/id/92/)

There is a color mask RGB shader in the forum. It might needs a bit a tweaking thought, but it could be a good starting point :

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/131514-Trying-to-creat-an-RGB-masked-color-shader

The RGB gives you 3 different color areas. You could also use the Alpha channel for an extra fourth color I guess if you don’t need to use it for something else… it really depends on your needs.

If you plan on having lots of customization then the color mask shader is a better and more flexible solution.

3

Great information! This was very enlightening, and I agree color masking would be best. I just tried out the shader in that link and it works great, except I need it to work with the toon shader. After some gumping around I was able to get the shader combination I needed.