Vertex colors with selectable team colors

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

Huh, this is what the Shader section looks like. Its so pretty. :slight_smile:

Hey everybody. We are preparing to begin developing assets for our upcoming mobile game. The game is going to have a multitude of characters presented in the flat shaded poly look.

I’m an experienced 3D artist/animator but have never dealt with vertex colors using Unity. I’ve performed a small amount of research and know Unity has a couple vertex shaders available to use out of the box.

We would like to allow parts of the characters mesh (not the entire character mesh) to be color set-able by the player. Like a lot of multiplayer games - where they allow you to set the ‘team’ color and all the units have accent meshes, and parts of the mesh that change to the color selected by the player.

First question is - If the model is completely colored using vertex shading, can certain parts of the model (masked setup by us - the developers) be color changed, while still retaining the rest of the models vertex shading?

I know this is a very simple setup using textures, and a mask to allow the masked area to be colored by the shader color, but with my limited experience with vertex colors/shaders, I’ve yet to find solid confirmation if this can be accomplished with vertex colors.

The reason we are considering vertex colors over a tiny color swatch/table texture to shade the assets is because our understanding is vertex colors are lower overhead compared to textures, unwraps of the models, and masking the areas with an additional texture or channel to derive the areas to be color-changable.

From the research I’ve performed - it appears a model can be UV’d and textured and use vertex shading to change the color of parts of the model. If this is the only method available we will go this route, though we prefer to use vertex shading if at all possible, with the ability to change the color of parts of the character mesh.

I’m aware of the vertex blend shader - this is not what we are looking for. We are looking to use vertex colors for the characters and mask areas to be color changed by the player during the game so they can select ‘team’ colors for the characters.

Thanks for all help provided and knowledge shared.

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its ok to combine texture mask with color. But you need to write a custom shader. No out of the box solution with shader included.

You can also use the alpha value of the vertex for masking. But don’t know if you modelling app supporting.

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Hmm - interesting. Thanks for the reply. We have a built in Vertex shading tool. I’ll have to make sure it supports alpha value shading to generate the masks.

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Overhead should be minimum if using alpha value as mask. But still need a custom shader to work with.

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