Texture Creation Guide

Purpose: Guide for creating mod textures using vanilla texture reuse and color transformation.

How it works: This skill is automatically activated when you mention tasks related to:

• Creating textures for custom blocks or items
• Reusing vanilla textures with color modifications
• Using ImageMagick for texture processing
• Creating wood variant textures (doors, trapdoors, etc.)

Simply describe what you want to do, and Claude will reference the appropriate guidance from this skill.

Reusing Vanilla Textures with Color Transformation (2025-11-15)

Approach: For custom wood variants, extract vanilla textures and apply color transformation to maintain visual consistency while ensuring rapid texture creation.

Workflow:

1. Extract Vanilla Textures

• Locate Minecraft client JAR: ~/.gradle/caches/fabric-loom/minecraftMaven/net/minecraft/minecraft/1.21.1/minecraft-1.21.1.jar
• Extract textures using unzip:

``bash unzip -j minecraft-1.21.1.jar \ "assets/minecraft/textures/block/jungledoortop.png" \ "assets/minecraft/textures/block/jungledoorbottom.png" \ "assets/minecraft/textures/block/jungletrapdoor.png" \ "assets/minecraft/textures/item/jungledoor.png" ``

• Use similar wood type as base (e.g., Jungle for yellowish woods, Oak for brown woods)

2. Determine Color Transformation Parameters

• Compare reference planks (e.g., Time Wood Planks vs Jungle Planks)
• Use ImageMagick histogram to analyze color distributions:

``bash magick timewoodplanks.png -format %c histogram:info:- magick jungle_planks.png -format %c histogram:info:- ``

• Calculate RGB channel multipliers by comparing dominant colors
• Example for Time Wood (yellowish-olive from brown):

- Red: 0.95× (slight reduction) - Green: 1.17× (significant increase for yellow tone) - Blue: 0.85× (reduction for warmth)

3. Apply Color Transformation with ImageMagick

magick input.png \
  -channel R -evaluate multiply 0.95 +channel \
  -channel G -evaluate multiply 1.17 +channel \
  -channel B -evaluate multiply 0.85 +channel \
  output.png

4. Iterate Based on Visual Feedback

• Test textures in-game
• Adjust RGB multipliers if colors don't match:

- Too green → reduce G multiplier, increase R/B - Too yellow → reduce G multiplier - Too dark/bright → adjust all channels proportionally

Known Color Transformations

Time Wood (from Jungle): R×0.95, G×1.17, B×0.85 - produces yellowish-olive tone

• Applied to: Door, Trapdoor textures (T080v-T080aa)

Temporal Stone family (vanilla stone → temporalstone): R×0.871, G×0.984, B×1.129 - produces the blue-gray temporal tone. Derived from mean-RGB ratio of temporalstone.png (109,124,142) over vanilla grayscale stone.png (~125.6). Apply to any vanilla grayscale stone-family texture to make its Temporal variant. Note vanilla stone textures are single-channel grayscale, so convert to RGB first: magick in.png -colorspace sRGB -type TrueColor -channel R -evaluate multiply 0.871 +channel -channel G -evaluate multiply 0.984 +channel -channel B -evaluate multiply 1.129 +channel -depth 8 PNG32:out.png

• Applied to: smoothtemporalstone.png (from vanilla smooth_stone.png)

Benefits

• Rapid texture creation (batch processing with ImageMagick)
• Visual consistency across all variants
• Easy iteration and adjustment
• Reusable approach for future wood types

Notes

• HSV color space transformations may not work well for fundamental color shifts (e.g., brown → yellow-green)
• RGB channel multiplication provides more control for cross-color transformations
• Always verify textures in-game before finalizing

Last Updated: 2025-12-08 Maintained by: Chrono Dawn Development Team