Anyways, I want to share a few things that I discovered awhile back about the nature of chao colours and textures that I haven't seen other people point out. I verified this for neutral and dark adults by ripping the textures from the game, but I couldn't get the hero or child chao model textures to rip properly, but I assume they work similarly.
So, as we know, basically every chao aside from jewel chao and coloured monotone chao will change their colours and markings depending on their evolutionary path. But how does that work?
=== BLENDING MODES ===
Through chao hacking and texture ripping, I found that each chao basically has four possible textures applied to it, which are as follows:
- Base colour - solid colour texture that changes for "normal" chao and remains stagnant for all other types
- Two-tone overlay - separate texture file(s) that are placed over the base colour and set to the blend mode "multiply"
- Shiny texture - separate texture file that is placed over the other base (and the two-tone if applicable) and set to the blend mode "screen" (possibly "dodge" or "overlay", hard to tell)
- Jewel texture - another separate texture file which is placed over any other texture files, covering them completely
The textures of the wings and emote remain unaffected.
Let's take a Dark/Fly/Fly chao for example.
Here he is normally:
If we remove his two-tone texture, he looks like this:
A nice shade of lavender!
Here he is shiny monotone, and shiny twotone (on PC, since I can't get screencaps from my Gamecube version)
So, how do we verify that the change in the colour markings is caused by varying the blending mode? Well, we can actually isolate the "pure" colours of the twotone texture by setting his base colour to be white, as any colour multiplied by white (#FFFFFF) is still itself.
So, voila, there is what the Dark/Fly texture appears like without being multiplied over another base. To demonstrate, I took this screencap and manually multiplied and dodged it over the monotone image.
It's not an exact matchup since the model itself is being affected by the level lighting, but you can see the general idea.
The same thing applies to a chao with a solid colour base.
Pretty neat stuff!
=== EVOLUTION ===
The other thing I want to touch on is how the colour is effected by a chao's evolution.
The base colour of a normal chao essentially exists on a multi-scale gradient. For those who don't know, the gradual evolution of your chao is dependent on four sliding scales:
- Alignment - this only effects the appearance of baby chao
- Swim/Fly leaning - giving your chao swim or fly animals / drives will move this slider towards one or the other
- Rub/Power leaning - same as above
- Magnitude - how far along in evolution it is
Here are some examples:
Neutral newborn --> Neutral/None baby
Dark/None baby --> Hero/None baby
When the overlay texture changes, one texture will simply fade out while the other fades in. This is pretty much only relevant to baby chao though, since adults of the same alignment and type will all have the same twotone pattern simply overlayed over different bases.
Various Neutral/Fly chao
Neutral/Run --> Neutral/Run/None
Neutral/Run --> Neutral/Run/Swim
Both of those start in the same place, but end up in different colours. You can also shift your chao's second evolution.
Neutral/Run/Swim --> Neutral/Run/Fly
As you can see, there are a lot of different colour possibilities. Most (if not all) of these can actually be found under the "invisible" colours that you can set your chao's base to manually via editing. Perhaps I will make a database of which invisible colour goes to which chao type, if someone else has not already done so lol
The main exception to the colour blending is hero chao, both babies and adults. All of them have white bases, and, though the two-tone texture is the same on all babies and all adults of the same type, the pattern itself is what changes colour rather than the base. I'm not entirely sure how that works, since I was unable to successfully rip all of the hero textures.
Various Hero/Power chao
Anyway, that's just some cool stuff I've figured out! Feel free to correct me on any mistakes or add your own information, I just thought I'd share this because I thought it was interesting.