Colorization Engine Setup

Material Instance and Colorization Engine Set-Up

Import the textures into engine along with the asset model.

Make a material instance and select one of the prop material parents. This example is using the MI_ASA_Equipment parent material.

Parent material for weapons and items

Plug in all 4 textures. The asset will look very colorful at first. Activate all applicable color regions used in your mask texture.

Textures plugged in. Colorization not active.

Final color values selected.

If an asset has an emissive region that should be colorized, activate the following options and select the correct color region that corresponds with the emissives.

It is important to leave the emissive without a custom color because the color is driven by whichever color is selected in the color region picker. If a custom base color is used for emissives, it will blend with whatever dye is added by players, causing inaccurate colors.

Emissive colorization setup.

Checking Your Work

To make sure the base colors selected are PBR accurate, use the visualize calibration custom filter. This shows a color value range of everything on your screen. Always try to avoid anything below 0.2 because it will eat light and feel unrealistic in game. This is sometimes hard to avoid or is accepted when materials like black rubber, obsidian, or other man-made materials are used.

Lastly, to make sure colorization on the asset works, follow these steps:

Play in the editor
Use the ~ cheat command GiveColors 20 to get all dye colors.
Spawn in the asset with a primalitem blueprint or a ~ cheat command.
Open your inventory and go to the customization tab.
Select a region, then select a color, then hit apply. Do this for all regions
Exit your menu and examine the newly colored asset to make sure it looks correct.

Default colors on the tek spear

RGBCMY dyes on the tek spear.

Colorization variant options

Picking the correct material instance

The overview above utilized the “MI_ASA_Equipment” material instance parent for setting up a colorized material instance. However, it is worth noting that when setting up an asset for colorization it is advised to consider what type of asset you are colorizing as there are a few different colorization functions and logic used in ASA. The first place to start would be consider what type of asset you are looking to colorize (weapon, armor, structure, etc.) Next, you would then look at similar assets in-engine to find a material instance parent that suits your needs. Some but not all of the most commonly used colorized material instance parents can be found in the table below.

Additional Set Up Steps

BP Colorization Settings

Along with material instance set up and settings there are also a couple BP settings required for item colorization to function properly in-game. The first settings are the “Use Item Color” indexes, these control which colorization regions are active in the in-game paint window. The following two settings are “UseItemColors” and “AllowCustomColors”, both must be checked on for colorization to be enabled, without either of these settings you will be unable to dye your asset in-game.

Tek Spear Primal Item BP Colorization Settings

Texture Settings

While not directly related to colorization this table below will go over the correct texture group settings for the textures involved in colorization as they vary between asset types. There are other texture settings that are important to check, but texture group is most relevant to colorization as the texture group varies between asset type.

Setting the texture group is quite simple, open up the texture and navigate to the parameter highlighted in the image below and set the texture group to the correct parameter according to your asset type. In the case of the image below we are looking at the Tek spear colorization mask so it has been set to “Weapon”.

In-editor view of the Tek Spear colorization mask texture settings with the texture group settings highlighted.

📔 While not specific to colorization textures it is important to set the LOD bias parameter. It is worth noting that colorization masks can typically be more aggressively LOD biased than other textures. As seen above with the Tek Spear colorization mask the LOD bias is set to 1 limiting the max in-game size of the texture from 4K to 2K.

Naming Conventions

Following naming conventions is a best practice that helps in identifying and organizing assets and their uses cases.

As all colorization assets are textures they should begin with the prefix “T_”, to denote that they are a texture.
Icon textures and their materials however, should receive the "HUD_" prefix.
Desaturated colorized diffuse textures including icon textures should receive the suffix "Colorized_D"
Colorization Mask textures including icon textures should receive the suffix "Colorized_M"
Icons should receive the suffix “_Icon” after the asset name but before the suffix denoting whether it is colorized or not.
Icon colorization material instances should receive the suffix “_Colorized_MIC”

In-editor examples of Tek Spear colorization assets following correct naming convention.

Creating Colorized Material or Colorization Function

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