Two-Tone Texture Guide

Credits/Pre-amble:

This write-up was created by Erubbu on the Chao Island team. With permission, I adapted the original image into a page on this site due to its explanation on how two-tone textures for chao work. While the guide is meant to explain the artistic approach for coloring character chao, it's also how the textures for neutral and dark chao work. Everything on this page after this point was written by Erubbu. Also feel free to check out the Chao Island site for more chao information.

Chao Texture Explanation

Every chao has a base colour and textures. Base colour is the colour of the chao itself, such as a Black Market coloured egg. 'Normal' colour, aka. Starter Chao coloured, is a unique base colour, selected as the Diffuse colour in Blender. This is also replaced if the chao has a specific base colour e.g. a Black Market coloured egg.

The textures are the markings added when a chao is 'Two-tone', located in your Chao's .PAK file. These are used if the character chao is 'two tone'.These textures are multiplied with the base colour. From Wikipedia: Multiply blend mode takes the RGB channel values from 0 to 1 of each pixel in the top layer and multiplies them with the values for the corresponding pixel from the bottom layer.

If you're not entirely sure about this, you don't need to know exactly what this means, The important part is that to think of it like each pixel of the base colour is darkened based on the texture. This is definitely an oversimplification, but for the basics, it's all you need to know.

Dark Highlights

For a standard chao colouring, it is better to put the base chao colour onto the model itself rather than to add it to the textures, as it may look odd unless it is intentional (see next section on light highlights).

In the left example, the purple colour of Blaze chao is selected on the model in the diffuse colour. The textures have a 'white background' as when the base colour is multiplied by the white colour in the white areas of the texture, it keeps the base colour the same. In the picture below, by doing this, you can see the two-tone Blaze chao is the same colour as the vanilla neutral/normal chao.

In the right example, the base colour is white, whereas the purple colour is on the texture itself. Compared to the left, the normal twotone looks fine, however the purple colour is now being multiplied with the other colours of chao; In the picture below, by doing this, you can see the two-tone Blaze chao are a darker colour than the vanilla neutral/normal chao. Unless the chao has been designed this way e.g. full body textures, it can look incorrect or misleading.

Chao Texture - Light Highlights

The above section specifically refers to chao's two-tone markings having dark twotone textures e.g. hands and feet. Some chao have areas of their body which are lighter than their bodies, such as vanilla Dark type chao and also newborn chao. For highlights such as light areas of the chao's body, having the 'body colour' added into the texture with the diffuse colour set to a lighter colour will be the more appropriate method in this case.