Palette Animation for Colour Cycling

[TheConfuZzledDude]

Way back in the day when space was limited, a cool trick to have really smooth animation of environments while maintaining disk space was to instead animate the palette, cycling the colours to create smooth transitions and animations without wasting space. It was used for everything from flowing water, to changing lighting, and even rain and snow.

An example

Basically this would mean attaching the current palette (only with indexed images I would suppose) to the frame of the animation, rather than it being global. This may also work well with the palette gradient feature, but instead changing the gradient across frames.

[dacap]

Hi @TheConfuZzledDude, it's strange but I thought that this issue was duplicated. At least in my head I've this already planned (internally a sprite can have multiple color palettes, but there is no User Interface to do that).

[ghost]

I’d love to see this too. Been looking for a software to replace Pro Motion that is free and open source thst can do this.

[dacap]

There are some work-in-progress about this one, internally it's supported, but the most difficult part is the UI (which needs some redesign of the Timeline to show the palette changes like a new layers)

[robin-raymond]

Any updates on if/when this feature might happen?

[XCompWiz]

There's very few references of this in the world now that I can find, but I wanted to mention two.
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ has nice examples and lets you see the palette animation in progress.
Mark Ferrari, one of the pioneers of the technique, talks about how he's done it in various tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

[dacap]

Related to:
#1731 (comment)
https://community.aseprite.org/t/color-cycling-effect/4137/3?u=dacap

[iangilman]

Wow, I see my comment has been marked as spam. Well, once again, without linking to my app: The community of artists I'm involved with who are fans of old-school color cycling artwork are excited for the possibility of this feature!

I'm in the process of starting up a new project to build rich scenes with color cycling artwork. I'm hoping Aseprite can be one of the tools we use.