Paint/Guide

work in progress - imported a load of the T3 page as a start, needs tidying.

Overview

Paint is mixed in a Pigment Laboratory, using eleven base ingredients and four catalysts. Paint mixing is person-specific; a recipe that works for one person will probably not work for another. Some combinations are non-reactive and will work for everyone, though will frequently be much more expensive than using a reactive mix.

Paint is used in some building construction costs, some research costs and for painting compounds.

   * Paint - full list of all possible colors including RGB percentages
   * http://atitd.centauri.org/colors - paint names with colours 

Colors

Each color can be represented by three numbers, giving the intensity (from 0 to 255) of each of the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. This triple is called an RGB value. The RGB value of pure white is (255,255,255), black is (0,0,0), red is (255,0,0), and so forth.

There are 142 unique paint colors that can be produced. When you mix a paint that has a given RGB value, the color from the list that is closest to that RGB value will determine what color paint you have mixed. For instance, if you produce a paint with an RGB value of (250,4,0), the paint will be red.

Ingredients and Mixing

There are eleven base ingredients, and each has a starting RGB value, listed below. Note: in earlier tellings, ores were used instead of metals, and carrots instead of carrot juice. However, the RGB values are unchanged.

Ingredient Short Red Green Blue Cabbage Juice cj 128 64 144 Carrot Juice cr 224 112 32 Clay cl 128 96 32 Copper co 64 192 192 Dead Tongue dt 112 64 64 Earth Light el 128 240 224 Iron io 96 48 32 Lead lo 80 80 96 Red Sand rs 144 16 24 Silver Powder si 16 16 32 Toad Skin ts 48 96 48

When you mix two ingredients, their colors are averaged according to how much of each ingredient is present. For example, if you mix two iron and one dead tongue, the resulting RGB value will be:

          io + io +  dt
Red   = ( 96 + 96 + 112 )/3 = 101
Green = ( 48 + 48 +  64 )/3 =  53
Blue  = ( 32 + 32 +  64 )/3 =  43

This color (101,53,43) is closest to SaddleBrown, so that would be the color of the paint. However, you will be unable to remove this paint from the pigment lab, since you must have added a minimum of ten ingredients (not necessarily unique) in order for the paint to be concentrated enough to use.

Ingredients are normally added in .1 deben quantities (when making one deben of paint), so if your recipe calls for one addition of el, you are actually only using one tenth of an earthlight mushroom; the remainder of the mushroom is kept in the paint lab for future use. If the paint lab runs out of a given ingredient, it will try to take another unit from your inventory.

With the unlocking of Mass Production of Color, pigment labs became upgradable to make paint in batches of 10 or 100. The amount of ingredients used was also multipled by 10 or 100, so adding one el when aking a batch of 10 paint uses an entire earthlight, and uses 10 earthlights when making a batch of 100. You still have to add 10 ingredients to complete the batch of paint.

Reactions

You may realize that it seems some colors, like white and black will be impossible; no mixture of the base ingredients will ever result in (0,0,0) or (255,255,255). However, there is a twist: some ingredients react with each other, to produce shift in one or more of the red, green or blue components of the color. For example, mixing together cabbage juice and copper will produce a different color that you might expect from the basic averaging. The magnitudes of these reactions for any given pair of ingredients are different for each person. The list of ingredients which react and their basic effect, however, is the same for everyone.

A crucial part of planned paint mixing is knowing your "reaction values", and how to apply them. See Paint Reaction Values for how to measure your reaction values.

The shift in the RGB values is constant for a given pair of ingredients, and is added on to the basic average. For instance, your cj-co reaction might be to increase the blue component by 36, leaving the red and green components untouched. It will always be the same, unaffected by how much cabbage juice or copper ore is present.

A reaction between two ingredients is order-dependant. The shift produced by cj, followed by co may be different than co followed by cj. Also, a reaction between any two ingredients will only take place once, regardless of ordering. So, if you add cj, co, cj, only the cj-co reaction will take place.

A reaction will occur whenever an ingredient is added to a mix containing ingredients it reacts with, and will react will all of those ingredients, subject to the above conditions. After five unique ingredients (reacting or otherwise) have been added, no further reactions will occur.

Finally, the reaction shifts are not included in the averaging when adding additional ingredients. So, to calculate the final RGB value of a given recipe, average together all the ingredients, then add all the accumulated reaction shifts. For example, if you have a recipe cj io co io rs cl cr cr cr cr cr, the final color value will be the averaged RGB value of all the ingredients, plus the shifts from the following reactions: cj-io, cj-co. Carrot does normally react with red sand, but that reaction doesn't take place because by the time carrot is added, there are already five unique ingredients in the mix.

Catalysts

In addition to the eleven base ingredients, there are four catalysts: lime, potash, saltpeter, and sulfur. These have no color of their own (and so don't affect the normal average mix), and do not count towards paint concentration. They do, however, react with other ingredients, in the same way ingredients react among themselves. Among the catalysts, sulfur and potash react with each other to produce yet another shift. The other catalyst combinations produce no reaction of their own. Catalysts do count towards the number of unique ingredients for reaction purposes.

Strategies

For the broadest range of paints and greatest ease in finding a recipe, the first step is always to document your personal reactions (see above). If you prefer a less methodical approach, getting a feel for your reactions and making guesses is often effective (though at some cost) - good starting points may sometimes be found by trying other people's recipes (search the wiki for 'paint').

When striving for a particular color, most mixers will check the RGB value on a color chart. Then compare that color to one of the 2-element averages to get a base mix. Then plan a catalyst / reaction strategy that gets you close, and begin experimenting.

Often an approximate guess and some follow-up tinkering will get you to a working recipe in a short while.

Once you have a color, don't settle for that one recipe. Most recipes can be tweaked using reactions to avoid costly ingredients like rare mushrooms, silver powder, or metals.

Tools and links

   * PracticalPaint Sigil's paint mixer program: http://www.atitd.net/forum/showthread.php?t=6823. 

  It does not have Dead Tongue listed in the Ingredients text so you need to add the following to that page: DeadTongue | 114,67,66  | 200  | 2

  You also need to add to the reactions text the following (when you figure out your own reactions the numbers on this reactions page will all change):
     DeadTongue Cabbage | B | -3, -37
     DeadTongue Carrot | R | -46, -62
     DeadTongue ToadSkin | G | 11, 9
     DeadTongue RedSand | B | 59, -14
     DeadTongue Lead | G | -23, 2
     DeadTongue Iron | B | 13, -46
     DeadTongue Copper | B | -57, 39
     DeadTongue Potash | B | 10, -1
     DeadTongue Lime | W | 15, 34
  If you use the following excel sheet it already has dead tongue entered: Excel.xls

  I use "Color Cop" to figure out my reactions, it can be found here : http://www.colorcop.net/download
  If you have questions about how to enter color cop info in the excel sheet you can chat me in game - Tawret

   * MarvL's Excel spreadsheet for reaction testing, Reactions_2007C02.xls, removes much of the pain from setting up and conducting your reaction tests. You just have to fill in the blanks, often just the single reactive color, and the spreadsheet does all the rest. You can then cut and paste the results into Word to strip out the tabs and blank/null lines, and feed the results into PracticalPaint. He's also working on a genetic algorithm approach, which will be able to take the named range directly out of the Excel spreadsheet. 

   * Kem?'s paint tool: http://www.misago.org/~neild/kempaint.tar.gz (Win32 binary: http://www.misago.org/~neild/kempaint.zip)
   * Septah's paint mixer: https://sourceforge.net/projects/paint-mixer/ (26 hours (1900Mhz) for all ingredients but earthlight)(program can't handle catalysts)
   * Neouni's Easy Guide
   * Neouni's Accurate Guide
   * Relevant T2 forum threads:
         o http://www.atitd.net/forum/showthread.php?t=6126 

Painters

For the amount of paint you will need in your life, it may not be worthwhile for you to learn paint mixing. If that is the case, you will want to contact someone who does have a lot of recipes to mix your paint for you. You can probably track down someone easily enough.

Related Links

reactionless paint recipes